My dad passed away a couple of years ago, and he played guitar all his life too. I have his old Gibson J-45, which I'm almost certain was made in 1944, which he bought new for a little over $300 dollars.. lol Here's a good site on the history of early Gibson J-45 guitars.
Anyway, long story short, the guitar wasn't treated very well, and the neck heel had gotten cracked bad enough that it needed to be fixed. So, quite a while back, before I had even started building guitars, I brought this guitar to a luthier at Batesville, in the northern part of the state, to what I was told, a great luthier. We'll he did repair it, and I payed him $300 dollars for the job, and I figured it was worth it since the guitar meant a lot to me. About six months later, I woke up to some noise, I couldn't figure out what it was, we'll guess what, the neck has snapped at the same exact spot. My guess is that the glue he used either didn't work in this situation, or he didn't steam out the rest of the heel and reattach it to the neck first before gluing it back in. I bought Dan Erlewine's Neck Reset DVD a couple of months ago, and talked to Robert(Soapbar) about the job. Between the both, I figured I was ready to do this. In the picture below you can see that the heel area and fingerboard extension had to be steamed and removed before I could fix the neck's dovetail, check for neck angle alignment, and glue it back together.
The steam can cause some blushing on the finish, but even Bryan Galloup had this same problem on the video. He has a trick to remove it that I'm going to try later on!!! Here's a closeup of the headstock. The other scratch marks on the finish was there before I started.
Headstock Banner Logo.
I'll post more later today... I'm hoping that by posting this, someone might get something out of it.
Matt Vinson