The second Old Gura with both oversaddle toning and composite figures was completed. This time a Levin parlor from 1925.
Good condition, but I have seldom seen such a Monday copy. In the 1920s, they began to make significantly more instruments and they hired many new employees who needed some time to learn. This one had several production errors. To begin with, the spruce lid was not completely dry when it was built (probably) as it had some real cracks below the stable but also on the cheek of the lid above the sound hole, something you rarely see. Furthermore, the head has a rather ugly twig on the front. When you sanded it before painting, you kept on the edge for too long in one of the lower bends. In one place the rim was only 0,2 mm thick! It would have been possible to drive in the little finger, but strangely enough it would have held together. The same thing had happened with the bottom which was 2,4 mm thick instead of the 3 - 3,5 mm that is usually common. The last one was just fine, considering how it sounds when it's done, you should thin out all the bottoms of Levin parlors to 2,5 mm! 🙂
The stable was of the simplest type and was replaced with a pyramidal rosewood stable. The fingerboard was a rather boring walnut plank and it too was replaced with rosewood. The neck was hard maple and good, but had a carbon fiber rod milled in as usual. The tuning screws were in poor condition and were replaced with new ones after plugging and reboring. The neck was not sanded completely straight so there had to be a small sanded edge where the neck protruded from the new straight board. The neck had received the usual screw in the base of the neck from the outside as the glue that is the only thing holding the neck on these had come loose. Someone had carved "ML" into the back of the head. Remnants of the paint on the once colorful brass plaque remained.
The new fretboard got a 16 ″ radius as desired. No K&K was installed.
The slightly grinded lacquer received a rail reinforcement on the inside, the bottom received five smaller ribs instead of four. The largest cracks in the lid were glued to a fir stick.
The stable leg received unusually scattered intonation points after the oversaddle intonation, a 4 mm wide stable leg was just enough. This was the first guitar I tried on a composite figure with maple and small bones under the strings. Made a new one with leg posts and spruce and made it sound a little better. A solid stable leg, one in maple and the one with final spruce are sent with the guitar. Once again, both the intonation and the sound became as good as I just got used to. Sounds good, especially when such Levin parlors are usually more difficult to frighten than Europeans from the same era (may be due to the long narrow lid on Levin parlors).
