Today I received a large shipment of Newtone strings after various problems with the shipment back home in Sweden. The package had rounded corners and a lot of address labels on it. What I have at home is:

Newtone Heritage, 0.10, 0.11 and o.12.
Newtone Masterclass 0.11 and 0.12.

Plus loose strings for the same set for both Newtone Heritage and Newtone Masterclass.

I'm about halfway through the new batch.

All necks have been given their carbon fiber rod, the bottom and top have been thinned and the bottom ribs glued in. In the picture, all braces and plates for the tops have been cut to size and shaped.

My collapsible go-bar jig is quickly screwed together for gluing the braces and plates, the table is part of the jig. The roof of the jig was first made with just one wooden board, then two, and finally it got additional reinforcement on top in the form of a framework. The pressure from all the go-bar rods is not to be trifled with! It works very well. The rubber-coated radius plate under the guitar has the same radius as the top and the braces.

All the braces and plates to be glued using matching cauls and bent go-bar rods. Special cauls for all the different braces and plates have been manufactured.

The gluing is done in two or three passes. The Go-bar rods with red markings are a few mm longer than the unmarked ones. The rods are made of 8 mm round birch rods that have been flattened on two sides to a suitable stiffness. The heat gun is always used to heat both the brace/plate and the top before each gluing with hot hide glue.

Here, all the braces and plates are glued, except for the brace under the fingerboard. That brace can later be given a different radius and give a different shape to the top under the fingerboard to avoid the need for a wedge to get a straight fingerboard. That brace is also rectangular in cross-section and made of pine instead of spruce. All to make the brace stronger so that it can withstand the string pull. Everything above the sound hole is there to make the guitar durable, the sound comes almost exclusively from the top below the sound hole.

A new article has appeared, this was published in the book "Småland's business in words and pictures" from 1918.

See also a previous blog post: Nässjö Musical Instrument Factory

If you read all the articles you get a pretty good grasp of the complicated history behind the Levin copies that were made around 1920 🙂

Also found some info about "NEW musical instrument factory in Gothenburg" in a sales advertisement:

"This factory was founded in the early 20's in Gothenburg (Sweden) by HJ Jonsson, who had been employed by Herman Carlson Levin for 14 years, the factory was situated in a 2 story house at Karlagatan 21 and had about 10 employees, they made lutes, guitars and mandolins, the factory stopped making instruments in 1939 when they were bought up by Ramona."

Probably the same Hjalmar Jonsson who was a foreman in Nässjö before that factory was closed down in 1917 🙂

I've had fun scanning some of the cheap Chinese sites in search of practical gadgets. It always takes a week or two for packages to arrive from China, if you're going to buy cheap it's much faster and safer with Swedish Amazon which has many interesting gadgets for a guitar repairman. I will report several of my findings, but this one the neck jig for straightening bent guitar necks was very good. It is solidly built in black anodized quality aluminum and with a suitable ssilicone heating blanketPreviously, I made my own jig relatively quickly with clamps, a caul, an aluminum plate and two travel irons, but this jig can be assembled much easier, faster and safer.

I had the opportunity to test it out at a flea market find that my buddy Mattias had bought. A cheap German parlor from the late 1950s in good condition, but with a bent neck. It worked very well. The fretboard was saturated with thick teak oil to reduce the risk of the fretboard shrinking in width. The neck was bent to a catback curvature as large as the relief the neck had before with the center screw in the jig, sthe silikon heating blanket was heated to about 80-90 degrees C. I double-checked the temperature and it matched the numbers on the knob. I had to replace the English wall plug with a standard 220 V European plug. It heated the fretboard and neck for about 30 minutes before I turned off the heat. The next day the guitar was removed from the jig and the neck was straight as a spear 🙂

Two plastic accordion dots in the fingerboard had been boiled and were replaced with real mother-of-pearl, but as the silicone heat blanket is narrower than the fretboard, the fretboard did not shrink much, the fret ends only needed a light filing on the tops and there was no sharp edge between the fretboard and neck. Since the silicone heat blanket is narrower than the fretboard, the fretboard had not shrunk much, the fret ends only needed a light filing on the tops and there was no sharp edge between the fretboard and neck.

There are two things to watch out for when doing this kind of heating. First, the fretboard can shrink in width due to drying out, and second, the varnish under the caul can either get pressure damage from the caul or the varnish can even stick to it. If you have a neck with a heat-sensitive varnish, you should reduce the temperature to about 60-70 degrees C and instead extend the heating time. The surface of the caul should be as smooth as possible to avoid pressure damage to the varnish (the caul in this jig has a dense and fine felt) and you should put household plastic between the caul and the varnish as a release agent. You can heat it a maximum of two times, then the neck becomes so stiff that it no longer wants to bend. If you can get the first heating right, a lot has been achieved.

I have come across several old European parlor guitars with a globe stamp on the bottom. Often you can make out the words "Trade mark" in the stamp. Alternatively the same type of globe stamped on the back of the headstock. I have always wondered who used that logo. Now I found the following text online about a similar guitar with a globe stamp on the headstock:

"On a German guitarsite they told me now that this is a "Biedermeier" style guitar which was popular in the first half of the 19th century and later had a renaissance at the beginning of the 20th. So this one is from the beginning of last century. It was supposedly made in the Markneukirchen Area, which has been a musical instrument Mecca for 350 years. The globe is supposed to have something to do with "Weldklang" (worldsound) a company which used the globe as their logo and which sold many different instruments by subcontractors, apparently also guitars, but that this history has been very sparingly documented.”

The mystery seems to be solved!

Edit: New information has come to light. Per Linder found a former German company with a globe as its logo;  G.A. Pfretzschner. There was even a receipt from JP Sjöberg in Sundsvall! I also received a picture of the logo that I have seen several times inside old European parlor guitars, but which I could not find again, a picture of which was submitted by Anders Lindberg.

It is always good to have a finished GammelGura in the shop, partly to show off to visitors and partly as an instrument for myself to play on. They tend to get sold when a customer takes a liking to it. Over the years I have had 3-4 shop guitars sold that way. Each time it has been replaced with a newly made GammelGura with the latest and most up-to-date details in the GammelGura renovation.

This time I chose an object that no one would choose as a starting point for a GammelGura, a beaten European parlor that someone had smeared red paint on the bottom and sides. Age undetermined, but perhaps around 1920. It was unusually small with a narrow rim and with an open string length of 61 cm. I didn't take any pictures of what it looked like in the original, it wasn't beautiful, but it was complete.

Here are some pictures when I got a little further along in the renovation. New bracing and the carbon fiber neck reinforcement had been glued in. A new mustache bridge had been made (the old one was planed down and broken) and a new rosewood fretboard had been shaped. The old tuning pegs had been replaced with a Stewmac Golden Age, the holes for the tuning pegs had been plugged, and new ones had been drilled. Both the top and the bottom had wooden bindings that were either missing or destroyed when I removed the bottom, new birch strips had been found. The top under the old bridge was destroyed, the top under the middle part of the bridge was sawn off and a larger and thicker spruce bridge plate was shaped to plug the sawn hole in the top from below. The bridge plate and the “plug” were made from one and the same piece of spruce.

Birch and maple strips are grateful as they can be quickly oxidized with Potassium Permanganate.KaliumpermanganatAfter treatment, the wood looks 100 years old.

The kerfing was very narrow, before I glued the bottom back on I glued on a strip of linden wood (taken from a wooden shutter) to get a larger glue surface. The milled-off wooden binding around the bottom also made the bottom so narrow that it did not rest completely on the original kerfing. A K&K mic was installed.

An annoying problem when gluing a bottom is making small notches in the kerfing for the ends of the braces. To make it easier to mark the position of the notch, I tape a thin piece of tape in the middle of the braces, which I can then use to mark the place of the notches on the kerfing with a pencil.

The new wooden binding was glued together with a decorative strip using hot glue and taped in place. The new fingerboard was also glued in place.

A critical step is gluing the neck, it is important to get the angle to the top of the bridge and the angle side-to-side correct. To angle the neck up, the top of the neck foot must be sanded down, which creates a gap in the dovetail attachment. I have made thin shims for the neck pocket in birch with different thicknesses, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5 mm using my thickness sander. They are glued with superglue and clamped in place using the neck as a clamp. To avoid gluing the neck by mistake, I use a piece of household plastic between the guitar and the dovetail of the neck foot.

I used colored stain and Potassium permanganate to dampen the worst of the dings before applying a coat of spirit varnish with a brush. The neck got a coat of black spirit varnish.

With the neck glued in, I install small pieces of frets along the center of the fretboard to fill in the fret grooves, and tuned the strings to tension with a makeshift nut and the back of two drills as a saddle. Nowadays, I let the guitar rest with the strings tuned up for about a day for the neck to settle in, I take the opportunity to vibrate the guitar in the meantime. Then the guitar with the strings at tension is fixed in my Stewmac jig. When the strings are removed, the neck will have the same bend as it has with the strings at tension. The fretboard is sanded to a nice relief, with the jig as a perfect work table. The fretboard had a wedge glued under the board at the top to make it straight, but after gluing the fretboard is never completely flat – usually there is a hump at the attachment to the body. Using a suitable radius block and coarse sandpaper, the fretboard is sanded flat. Then a 0.15 mm relief is sanded into the board. The first rough relief sanding is done using a special reference stick and a short radius block. By sanding between the outermost red-to-red, then 1-to-1, red-to-red, 2-to-2, red-to-red, 3-to-3 and red-to-red according to the reference stick, a relief bend is sanded into the fretboard (the middle is sanded more often). When a measurement with a straight ruler and a 0.15 feeler gauge says that the middle of the fretboard has the correct bend, I use an aluminum beam with a negative 0.15 mm relief milled in a CNC and a self-adhesive sandpaper to give the relief a completely even curvature.

When fretting, I use my simple plank jig. Nowadays, I use three clamps to press the frets in place. When a fret, which is also glued with superglue, is hammered in, I first use my new fractal press to press the fret evenly, then a clamp with the same radius as the fretboard. That clamp is then moved to the next fret to be installed, and a third clamp with a slightly smaller radius presses the previous fret tighter at the ends while the glue cures. I always install the odd frets first and then the even ones, partly to reduce the back-bend from the frets when they are pressed into the fret grooves, but also to give more room for the clamps. The fractal press is a cheap Chinese version that has been modified for a regular clamp.

The guitar is again mounted in the Stewmac jig for fret crowning. The special aluminum beam is used to give the top of the frets a smooth relief, this time with a finer sandpaper. The sandpaper reveals when all the fret tops follow the relief curve.

A segmented saddle and an intonated nut were made. The adjustment of the tuning points in the nut and saddle were unexpectedly small on this particular guitar. Newtone Heritage 0.12 was strung on. The sound was unexpectedly good! The volume is not the highest, but the tone is very even and woody.

The situation is desperate right now, too many GammelGura items in the queue and also 5-6 slightly larger repairs to be done. There is a stop to orders for both new GammelGura projects and larger repairs. However, I cannot avoid helping local customers with simpler repairs or installing K&K pickups, etc. A lot of time has been used for some of my own projects as I have gained a new interest in music and needed a working 12-string and mandolin. Most recently I finished a new shop guitar (the previous one has been sold), I need one like that to show to customers and play when the mood strikes. I have decided that any new own projects should not interfere with the normal working hours in the shop.

The positive thing is that after a year of tinkering with songs and my recording studio, I have taken stock of the queue and am excited to work on the GammelGura projects again! Things are going to happen now. I will return with “before” pictures of the GammelGura projects in the batch, I am waiting for the harp guitar to be delivered. One of the guitars in the queue belongs to my only customer in the USA who provided me with several GammelGura items that have been lying around for a long time, I intend to take on one of his guitars in each new batch going forward.

GG225 Levin 1911
A slightly larger Levin parlor in "Concert" size. Lovely vintage and in good condition. This one will be good 🙂

GG227 Levin 1930
A *bling* Levin from around 1930 with extra fine flamed birch and colored stain (have seen gray, blue, green, yellow and red – this one is almost black!) on the back and sides. These are basically very simple parlor guitars, but in the transition to the new models that came later, the finest wood and all the tailpieces and floating bridges were used. Usually the finer mother-of-pearl inlays were also used in the fretboard, but are missing on this one. I don't think I've seen one like this with a fixed bridge.

GG224 Nassjö
A typical Levin rip-off with much more *bling* than regular Levin parlors from the same era. Extra beautiful wood, bindings and details, but almost always a bit clumsily put together with too thick wood. This one may be an exception, I'll see when it's taken apart.

GG228 Coles circa 1900
The aristocrat of the batch, a Coles circa 1900th century (model 1898) with the finest rosewood in the back and sides. Magnificent decorated inlays in the fretboard, headstock and bridge. Very well built and lavish!

GG226 KB harp guitar 1903
The joy of carpentry from the batch 🙂 I'm waiting for that, in the meantime here are some pictures I received from the customer.

This measuring stick, intended for measuring tread depth in tires, I will use to measure that the fret groove is deep enough for the fret's tang. The nice thing is that it has a Nonie scale which allows you to measure in tenths of a mm.

My playing buddy Björn Sohlin brought the family's party instrument from the early 1920s and onwards for repair. It was, to put it mildly, ravaged – in fact, one of the most abused guitars I've ever seen! I found some pictures on the phone that I got from Björn before I started working on it 🙂

Here are some pictures of it before the renovation, I managed to remove the duct tape from the bottom and install the loose saddle, string pegs and tuning screws before I took the pictures.

It had been repaired before, one of the tuning pegs was missing a knob, but had a metal hook soldered in instead (didn't get it in the picture). I've never seen such a tattered fretboard, several mm deep play pits! The year was uncertain as the serial number couldn't be deciphered, but the provenance said early 1920s which is a good guess. On the bottom was Levin's brand mark, a small piece of the original label from the dealer that says Finspång – I've seen those before. And a nice repair label from 1977. I hope there were some other amateurs who nailed the bottom and used Karlsson's glue as glue! Someone had also brushed on some kind of modern varnish on the bottom and sides, luckily not on the lid or neck.

My mission with this one was to keep as much of the weathered look as possible, but make it fully playable. The record-worn board was to be kept, the planed and brown-stained bridge and top nut were replaced with originals from previous renovations. The neck was given a carbon fiber rod and the ribs were replaced as usual.

The fretboard was removed with heat from my travel iron, a Stewmac “double knife” and some water. I have acquired small handy scraper, which came in handy for scraping off the carpenter's glue that had first been soaked up with a wet paper towel. Someone had set fire to one edge of the fretboard!

The neck had been reglued a couple of times, a lot of wood from the neck block came with it.

Inside there was a lot of glue and also some nails through the bottom!

The reused original stable from a previous renovation had too large pin holes. The holes were plugged and the black paint was sanded off. The too high stable was planed down to the right height and flattened out on top for a stable leg. The old stable had two screws that were not needed.

The neck was poplar and surprisingly straight, but the carbon fiber rod is a must. Since I kept the fretboard with its fret placement and glued the bridge in the same place, I had to make the neck attachment 4 mm deeper to make room for an intonated bridge leg instead of the inferior construction with a long fret as a bridge leg at the front of the bridge. The whole guitar became 4 mm shorter, but now the intonation is correct.

The fingerboard's pits were filled with superglue – half a bottle! The entire surface between the 1st and 2nd frets is now made of plastic. Here I made a mistake, or rather learned something new, there were air bubbles in the thick glue at the bottom. You should use thin superglue first of all to fill in the air-filled pores in the wood before applying the thick layer of glue, I was taught. But considering the condition of the guitar in general, I just added a little more patina and it was as it was 🙂 The board got new frets.

The modern varnish was easy to peel off as it did not adhere well to the old varnish. Half of the varnish could be removed by taping on and off with ordinary packing tape, the rest had to be scraped off with a razor blade. The entire guitar was then stained with water-based stain and/or quickly oxidized with potassium permanganate in all the dings. After that, the entire guitar received a coat of alcohol varnish which was then mattified with steel wool and hand-polished to a reasonable shine.

The bottom was thinned in a roller polish, but before that the two labels were saved. The lid was also thinned by half a mm on the inside. The repair label from 1977 was glued further into the guitar. Apart from the oversaddle tuning and segmented bridge leg, it was a complete GammelGura renovation, it got a label to complement the others. The bottom had shrunk considerably and came loose in the middle joint. To compensate for the 3 mm that was missing in width, the bottom was bound all around in rosewood.

It sounded OK when it was finished, but I missed the clean tone from the over-saddle tuning. The guitar has been presented to the family who liked how it turned out. It will certainly be handled at more parties in the future, hopefully it will last another 100 years 🙂 The heel cap had been forgotten when I took the pictures, but was glued back before it was delivered.

After the paint job, the serial number became clearer. I think I can guess 34420, which means 1917.

One of my own projects was completed over the long weekend. An LTS-5 Levin 12-string, a guitar model that I have a bit of history with. I also made a 1953 Levin Mandolin playable for Andreas Nilsson who is currently recording in my home studio.

This one was like the second instrument I bought (the first was a nylon-stringed Levin LG-17). A twelve-string LTS-4 with a flat head. It was bought used in a shop in Stockholm around 1985. It was in poor condition and needed to be repaired before I could pick it up. I remember it cost 1000 SEK. The neck conversion that was done was not entirely successful and when I played it for a while the string height was painfully high. It was my main guitar for a few years before I got a more easy-to-play guitar, some dreadnought variant from Japan I think it was. As usual, I couldn't keep my fingers away and the plastic pickguard was replaced with teak veneer that was in the family's possession. Not very nice and not something I would do again!

At that time I didn't know that there were easy-to-play guitars that also sounded good and I didn't care much about tuning (which was basically impossible to achieve since the intonation was completely off due to the high string height). The fact that it only sounded string was no obstacle, and a bunch of songs were written with it. That guitar is still in storage and one day I might take it on.

In 2014 I renovated a 5 LTS-1962 for Pelle Henriksson's studio in Umeå.. When I opened it up I was surprised to see that it had a huge 5 mm thick plywood plate under the bridge across the top! No wonder it was in good condition but just sounded stringy.

A 5 LTS-1966 in good condition was recently purchased at auction by Greger Wickberg, a friend and musician here in Örnsköldsvik. It turned out that it needed a neck set and general repairs, so I ended up buying it for the same amount as at the auction; 3000 SEK. Since I know that there is a lot of potential hidden behind the dull sound of strings, I wanted it as a complement in my own home studio. I didn't have a 12-string that I could or wanted to play.

This model is very strange. All the wood is of the highest quality, with impressive flamed maple in the back, but the sound is completely sabotaged by the bracing in the top. Since they sound so bad as original, they are rarely expensive to buy, even though they were expensive when they were sold. For some reason, it took a long time before Levin adopted the X-bracing for larger guitars or 12-strings with high string tension. Instead, they glued in more and thicker ladder braces, or as in the one from 1962, a solid plywood plate to make it last!

The binding was stuck like a rock, it was sacrificed and milled away around the bottom to access the glue joint between the bottom and side. Cellulose varnish is brittle and cracks easily when you try to pry off bindings with a razor blade. A new “yellowed” plastic binding looks just as good as the original. The glue was so hard that I couldn’t separate the joint without cracking the cellulose varnish, so half the bottom was sawed off through the kerfing. Once open I could see that the bracing in the top was like a bad joke with no less than 9 heavy ladder braces, 4 of which replaced the plywood plate in the previous one I renovated. The braces were also stuck like a rock with the modern glue that Levin used in the mid-1960s and I had to use a pair of pliers, knives and planes to clear the top of all the braces.

The neck has no dovetail and is only held in place with two nuts and glue under the fingerboard on the top. The nuts are attached to the same iron rod that also functions as a truss rod under the fingerboard. To make the job easier, the truss rod/attachment had to remain, it works perfectly OK on a large guitar. The fingerboard could be in place for once. The tuning screws work OK but not well, I have ordered new Golden Age ones to replace them when I get them home. The knobs are a bit wide on the originals, and you almost pinch your fingers when you tune. They got better after cleaning and oiling, but still not quite good.

New braces were made and glued into the top and bottom. New kerfing was glued in around the bottom and a K&K pickup was installed. Since the bottom was to be milled all around for a new binding, I didn't have to fit the bottom particularly closely to the sides. The frame had cracks on both sides of the bottom block and maple veneer was glued in across the cracks. The bottom had shrunk and part of the bottom was sticking out at the waist, as usually happens when a shrunk bottom is glued back in without forcing it into place and building in tension.

Nowadays, I do all X-bracing as a double X. I have never liked the two slanted braces in a standard Martin X-bracing, which often causes the top to bulge up behind the bridge due to string pull. The double X has an undeservedly bad reputation since Gibson used it but made both X's far too strong. The smaller X behind the bridge should be made considerably thinner.

The bridge, in genuine BRW, was heavily modified by me in the same way as in 2014. The middle part of the classically inspired string-through bridge was milled down to about 3 mm thick from the saddle and back, and an L-shaped fitting piece was glued on top. Unfortunately, I didn't take any good pictures of the bridge being modified, the look of the original is shown in the first slide. Two strings fit in each string peg hole, and short pieces of a 3 mm thick metal rod ensure that the strings get the right separation over the saddle. It's a little more difficult than usual to string on, but if you just make sure that both string balls are pressed into the hole before mounting the string peg and tightening the strings against the bridge plate, there's no problem. The principle works well, it may take an extra day before all the strings "set", but then it holds the tuning. When I made my segmented saddle, I had to make 8 mm wide bone posts so that both strings would fit on top.

The fingerboard extension on the top needed a triangular shim under the fingerboard after the neck set to avoid too much “slope off”.

A new plastic binding around the bottom was glued in after milling.

Since the fretboard had white binding along the edges, I milled out the grooves for the frets using a small router and my Proxxon dremel. I took the opportunity when the fretboard was sanded to 0,15 mm relief in my Stewmac jig. The ugly plastic dots in the fretboard were replaced with real mother-of-pearl at the same time.

The frets, with the tangs on both ends cut off, were mounted in my simple plank jig. When I was fretting near the body with my fret press, I heard an unexpected noise. Since the neck is only attached to the nuts and has nothing substantial to withstand the pressure from the fret press, the neck foot had slid down the side a few tenths of an inch and bent the fingerboard. In any case, it was possible to force the neck back into the correct position and secure the neck with a spacer under the neck foot.

The entire guitar was dulled with fine steel wool, Trollull 000, and brushed with a thin coat of alcohol varnish. Alcohol varnish consists mostly of shellac and adheres well to everything. The alcohol varnish becomes extremely shiny, to restore the original appearance, the alcohol varnish is dulled with the same steelwool after it has dried overnight. A dull shine can then be polished up via friction with a pair of cut-up white tube socks. When the varnish is not fully hardened and still a little tough, you cannot get the shine back completely, but you can polish it again after about a month when the varnish is fully hardened to get a little more shine.

The guitar was strung with light steel strings, a 0.09 set, and measured for intonation. The latter was quite a job as there were twice as many strings! Most of the thin strings intoned about the same as the thicker ones, the exception being the thick E string where there was a difference of a couple of mm when intoning the top nut.

I am very happy with the result. It sounds very loud and good and has a uniquely good intonation for a 12-string! It has a solid and clean sound instead of the usual jumble of jingle&jangle.

At the same time I refretted, changed the tuning screws and spruced up a Levin Madolin model 53 from 1953. It also turned out well. Here are some pictures of it and the two together. Big & small 🙂

Both were vibrated as usual for three days for the best sound. When I close the cabinet, I don't hear much of the annoying buzzing sound.