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 😉
All in plywood. The neck needed to be replaced, the straps and tuning screws replaced, the stable glued and a new pickguard protected (the old one was missing, used the shadow in the paint as a template). Also discovered that the cross in the lid rib was of a secondary kind, one rib was whole the other was in two parts and simply glued block to the first… One of the two loose ribs had come loose at the cross. Glued and put a "lid" on top of the cross to get the two parts together. Then there were 5 crush damage 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!
Did not want much torque on the stable, so I glued the neck at an angle where the long ruler did not end up on top of the stable as usual but about 3 mm below. It turned out to be absolutely perfect after a grinding of the fretboard (it had a large "Korean 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 🙂
The catalog from 1966 states that "the fixation of the stable and the internal structure prevent the lid from deforming". Jaja 😉
Fun to see how it came to life again. I have a 12th Höfner from 1965. Faithful companion through all the years, I am so used to playing on it that a 12th with a narrower neck is difficult for me to play, it does not sound as good at all 🙂 Mine is now quite worn with oblique neck, hollowed-out fingerboard, worn tuning screws, broken pickguard, worn in the lacquer on the lid, the string attached a little loose from the lid, but it works and what a nice sound it is in it. Bought a cheaper 12, but it has a narrower neck, difficult to take "clean" chords, so I lean more and more towards having my old one repaired, but I do not know if I can afford it as a pensioner.
But it was fun to read about this one you fixed 🙂
// Lasse N