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.