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Gibson Hummingbird


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well today, in my dads friends garage i found a gibson hummingbird (im pretty sure its real, he says it is and hes been playing guitar for ages think he picked it up in the early 70's 2nd hand..) the headstock has been broken and glued back on.. how could i fix this?

anyway, pics! (taken with my w810i) they big so u can see it in detail of cracks etc..

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after polished

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Edited by Al3x
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You're going to get a verbal pasting for posting such big photos - there are size and quantity rules regarding photos in posts here.

anyhoo, if i'm making this out right, it looks as though the scarf joint has popped. there are a few ways to fix this, how badly do you want to preserve the broken off bit of the headstock? some people would create a new head stock and clean the scarf joint up, there are ways to preserve the remainder of the headstock but i don't know enough about them to offer any really good advise.

Edited by NJD
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yeah i dunno, he picked it up in late 60's. and i think the neck was attempted to replace with one from a cheap $50 guitar using some random wood glue, could prolly get it off if i heat it up. but the neck feels alright i wanna keep it.

i also saw a neck like that in about 4 bits in the garage lol.

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Not a Gibson.

That means you can try the headstock fix yourself without worrying about buggering a valueable guitar (which older Hummingbirds are....). Looks like the break is all the way through the headstock, true?

Remove the strings and see if there's a clean dry fit with no gaps. If so, remove the tuning hardware, dry fit it and run some painters tape across the front of the headstock, then open up the back side (leaving the tape stuck down) and apply a thin uniform coat of original Titebond to one side (not Titebond II or III), making sure the entire surface has glue on it.

Close the joint, apply some clamps lightly across the joint making sure you clamp over the tape to keep it from slipping, wipe off the squeeze-out, then tighten the clamps and leave it for 24 hours. You'll probably want 4 clamps on a joint like this, C-clamps work fine if you put a thin wood caul underneath to keep from denting the headstock. Place a layer of wax paper between the caul and headstock to keep them from being glued together.

This is basically Setch's scarf joint method applied to a headstock fix.

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mmm yeah, might not be a gibson but man is the thing nice! the heads been glued on, i put strings etc on it and its holding and stuff.. the hard part is the bridge. cant get my hands on it and only gibson/epiphone look to have them. its one of them beefy ones. using a icypole stick wedged in there at the moment :S

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