Repairs

After the summer holidays, an unusual number of local repairs appeared. I have worked with them for almost three weeks. Next week I will start the next batch with GammelGura, not a day too early… Summer is always a difficult time for me, I am allergic to pollen and my efficiency is not the best. Every autumn I wake up from the sleep and get twice as much done. These repairs were a very mixed bag, some Gottfried Söderman, some Levin, a German guitar lute, some mandolins and a number of modern steel string guitars.

An unusual 1931 Levin model, of the “Robert Johnsson” type, needed a new tailpiece and new frets as well as new tuners. A ca 1925 German guitar lute, with a sound hole decoration cut out directly in the spruce top, had a crack in the top, a sunken top and lacked some tuners

The Levin went well to repair, in addition to new frets, a new nut, new tuners and a tailpiece from a 1930s Levin, the bridge was adjusted and new strings were put on. This is a very beautiful guitar, but also one of the ones that sounds the worst in original condition of all the Levin models. It has a canned sound despite three days of vibration. If this is to sound good, a real GammelGura conversion with a pin bridge is required.

The German guitar lute was more difficult. I cut out the sound hole decoration and glued together the loose pieces that came loose after the cut. To be able to reassemble it, I made a ring of a 2 mm thick rosewood binding and fitted the decoration into the ring. The ring could then be glued into the sound hole and can easily be detached by the next person to repair. Two braces in the top below the sound hole were removed. The braces were high and so sharp at the top that you could cut yourself on them! The lower brace was for some reason placed behind the bridge, which explained why the top was deformed and sunk in front of the bridge. No bridge plate. I glued a small bridge plate in maple and two new braces with the bottom brace in front of the bridge instead of behind. The crack in the lid was glued and got some glue patches on the inside. The fretboard was leveled and refretted with EVO gold frets, a new bone nut and saddle was made. I got hold of original tuners for a lute similar to this one on the German eBay. They fitted almost perfectly. Really nice to play with 0.11 Newtone Heritage strings.

Another guitar part Gottfrid Söderman was in for repair. This is from the mid-1930s when he made many similar guitar rhymes. They come in different sizes and with different numbers of strings, six or eight. This one was smaller than the full-size guitar lutes and had two mandolin tuning screws, the G and e strings were doubled. The menstrual cycle is also shorter, probably due to the tension from the extra strings and the fact that the tuning screws for mandolins are narrower than those for guitars. The stable and the fretboard are in a mysterious wood that is probably some kind of harder and dark red "mahogany", have seen the same thing on other Söderman. The fingerboard, of course, had his patented daughters in the form of small shirt buttons in mother of pearl! In the same spirit as the staples on the one I wrote about earlier from 1971. Solid lid in spruce and plywood in the bottom and side, the neck probably in birch or maple.

Two knobs on the tuning screws were broken and replaced with replica knobs in bone, the tuners were cleaned and lubricated. A crack in the top was glued, the glued bridge also came loose and was re-glued. I warm-bended the neck back as far as I could and sanded the fingerboard thinner at the upper saddle. I re-fretted with EVO gold frets. To lower the string height further at the 5th fret, I lowered the bridge about XNUMX mm in height and mounted a sloping intoned fret on top of the bridge. I drilled new holes for the strings in the bridge to get a better breaking angle over the bridge fret/saddle.

The small format gives a thin sound without much bass, on top of this extra brilliance from the doubled strings. A bit like a half twelve-string guitar. Really cool guitar strap in silk came with the lute <img draggable="false" role="img" class="emoji" alt="" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.0.0/svg/1f642.svg">

A Levin parlor from 1925 came in for repair to playable condition. It had been repaired earlier with epoxy glue in the neck and bridge. The bridge had an "ingenious" solution, nylon strings had been used without string pins by means of holes drilled from the front of the bridge into the string pin holes. A kind of a string-through bridge. I have never seen THAT before! It had been in water at some point and about 5 cm of the side near the end block bulged out and had come loose from the bottom. Very high string height. Fortunately, the gluing of the neck had been poorly done, only about a third of the neck pocket had glue. This allowed me to loosen it with a little ultra-force without damaging the neck pocket or neck. Epoxy glue is not a problem with bridges, where you can get at it well with the spatula in sheet metal.

I tried to push the bulge into the rim with a clamp, but then the bottom cracked. There was no alternative and the bottom was picked loose. Equally good when all the bottom braces were loose and had to be re-glued. The braces in the top sat well, but I could not avoid removing the horrible birch strip across the top under the bridge and replacing it with a bridge plate in spruce. I also glued in a couple of narrow and flat spruce braces on both sides of the sound hole.

The bottom was glued with fish glue and the neck was reglued with hot hide glue. The top was slightly sunken at the sound hole so the fretboard had a triangular shim glued under the fretboard to keep it straight. The fretboard was allowed to keep the original frets. It turned out that one of the tuning screws, the one for the E string, was worn and toothed over. I found a similar tuning screw that I replaced the bass side tuning screw with. The tuning screws were reconditioned with a hammer on the rivets, the posts were bent straight with pliers with smooth jaws and the tuning screws were oiled with TriFlow.

The bridge, which was high as they sometimes are, was glued with hot hide glue and planed down on top and painted with black spirit varnish. A fret was used as a bridge saddle as in the original, but with a slope for better intonation. Six old string pins were found. A new bone saddle was made.

The bridge plate in spruce gave the guitar a better sound than ever <img draggable="false" role="img" class="emoji" alt="" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.0.0/svg/1f642.svg">

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