Got a bad conscience today, a giant guitar for guitar that needed a general fix. Have never seen a bigger head on a guitar, nor a neck so wide. The head is 25 cm long and the grip board 55 mm wide at the top! If you brought it with you on a canoe trip you did not need any spare paddle. Some chords are a bit difficult to reach 😉
Entirely in plywood. The neck needed to be replaced, the strings and tuning screws replaced, the bridge reglued and a new plectrum cover made (the old one was missing, used the shadow in the varnish as a template). Also discovered that the cross in the ribbing of the lid was of the second kind, one rib was whole the other was in two parts and simply glued to the first... One of the two loose ribs had come off at the cross. Glued and put a "lid" on top of the cross to bring the two parts together. Then there were 5 crushing damages on the side, glued wood on the inside and the mossy wood in the crusher became stable.
The lid was deformed around the stable, it warmed the plane under pressure before I glued on the stable. It got better, we'll see if it lasts.
The stable received new solid string sticks in milk plastic. The stable leg was silly thin, so I milled up the groove for a 3 mm stable leg. By moving the intonation point as far back as it was on the new thicker stable leg, I actually made it intonate perfectly OK. This is probably the first time on this guitar!
Didn't want to have a lot of twisting force on the stand, so I glued the neck in at an angle where the long ruler didn't end up on top of the stand as usual but about 3 mm below. It turned out to be absolutely perfect after a sanding of the fingerboard (it had a big "Korea hump" at the neck attachment).
The new tuning screws were 1 mm too long, so I had to file them all shorter for them to fit.
Clamped on a new set of 0.10 strings. Apart from the fact that it is very difficult to play due to the very wide fretboard, it sounds surprisingly good! In one of the pictures you see the 12 next to my local parlor - big & small 🙂
In the catalog from 1966 it is stated that "the fixation of the stable and the internal structure prevent the lid from being deformed". Well 😉
Nice to see how it came back to life. I have a 12th Höfner from 1965. Faithful companion through the years, I'm so used to playing it that a 12th with a narrower neck becomes difficult for me to play, it doesn't sound nearly as good 🙂 Mine is now quite worn with slanted neck, hollowed-out fingerboard, worn tuning screws torn plectrum cover, worn in the paint on the lid the string attachment is a little loose from the lid, but it works and what a nice sound it has. Bought a cheaper 12th, but it has a narrower neck, hard to take "clean" chords, so I'm leaning more and more towards having my old one repaired, but I don't know if I can afford it as a pensioner.
But it was fun to read about this one you fixed 🙂
// Lasse N