Grand Canyon on my Zebra Wood Strat

I have a Zebra Wood Strat body I bought around 1977, it is a Schecter body, back when Schecter used to make parts, and what great parts they made too. The bridge, the jack plate and the knob all were bought about the same time, all Schecter parts too. Great stuff.

I got plexi-glass material and made a pickguard. I made this about 11 years ago. I used to have a Beatles picture under the plexi. I recently put a Grand Canyon picture, one of my calandar pictures. It is the North rim of the Grand Canyon with snow in it. I love how the brown and white stripes match the Zebra Wood. You can now buy plexi pickguard material. Mine was originally just a sheet of plexi.

I love this strat. The neck is an All Parts neck, big frets, Fender roller nut with roller string trees. The pickup is a Duncan JB with a volume knob and a single, series, parallel switch. Oh, and the bridge is a non tremelo bridge, strings through the body. No tuning issues here, you can bend the notes like crazy and it always returns to proper tuning. The headstock has a decal that is my name.

Years ago this guitar had three strat pickups, real sweet sounding.

Epiphone SG With Broken Headstock

This Epiphone SG was dropped at a music store and was thrown in the junk pile where my lucky brother picked it up and bought it for very little money to salvage the parts. He is a huge SG fan and has many so he figured spare parts would be good to have. When I caught wind of this I said "don't touch it, don't do anything, I will fixed it for you....."  He said "ok.....?!" I picked it up with the strings still attached and the head taped together to hold it near where it should be.  




Nice clean break makes for a good glue joint.

Fender Jazz Bass with Uneven Action and Back Buzz

Got a Fender Jazz Bass in the other day....the action, (height of strings) got higher as it went up the neck, (toward the body). The truss rod was tightened all the way. The owner wanted the strings level all the way up the neck. What do you do? I heat the neck to reshape it so that the neck does not have what I call a "ski jump" at the end of the neck, (end is frets 21+).  Once it is level then I can use the truss rod again and have plenty of travel left in the rod after it is adjusted.

When there is a "ski jump" at the end it causes fret buzz when played between frets 12 through 15, when the strings, or action, is lowered. It is because the fingerboard is higher around fret 20 and lower around fret 12, or in other words fret 12 area is in a valley, and fret 20 is higher than 12.

The way to cure that is to tighten the truss rod, which raised the valley, or straightens out the neck. If the truss rod is already tightened all the way, then you can't get rid of the valley. There may be a compound problem, the truss rod may make the area between frets one and twelve too straight or give it a back bow and will not "raise the valley" in the area of frets twelve through twenty one. That is where the heating comes in.

Les Paul Hits the Dirt

Gibson Les Paul with a cracked peg head that someone had  screwed together and did not use any glue. Filler was used to hide crack line and then painted over with a house type paint.

The guitar was dropped a second time and a crack ran down the neck a couple inches parallel to the truss rod. A couple hose clamps do a great job of holding it together. 

Paint scraped off and clamped and glued in the right places. Wood dowels were glued into the two screw holes.

Couple clamps and hose clamps and glue go a long way! You can see the dowels  sticking out of the neck.

Penco Acoustic Bridge Repair

This Penco Acoustic had a bridge with a crack that ran from end to end, through the bridge pin holes. Normally if glued back together and glued to guitar it will not hold due to string tension pushing forward on the crack.

The owner wanted to keep the guitar, it had played well in the past and wished to keep it in good playing condition. It was near impossible to find a new bridge that looked like the original.