‘Repair info’ Category

  1. What is a Fretdress?

    February 18, 2011

    From time to time you may notice your guitar will start to buzz when fretting. Mostly, this will occur between frets 7-9 or above the 12th. You may take it to a repairer and have them tell you it needed a “fretdress”.

    Not wanting to sound uneducated you enthusiastically agree. To which they take your guitar and walk into their back room ne’er to divulge their practice.

    Of course you pick it up and then faint at the bill.

    A fretdress, is a solution to the problem of uneven frets. Sometimes (due to a wide variety of factors, ranging from humidity to climate to tension over time etc etc) the neck will sweep into an: (more…)

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  2. How to Restring your Guitar

    January 30, 2011

    We get a lot of people coming in complaining about intonation issues, tuning issues and issues involving the strings breaking “Please please help, give me the full setup just stop the madness!” They cry.

    We look over their guitar and simply say “Let me show you how to string your guitar properly.” The response is usually nothing short of worship, but hey, its the cross we bear in this industry.

    We also have to thank the talented Ralee Winks for supplying us with these lovely illustrations

    Step 1:
    step-1

    The string comes up and rests in the inner side of the machine head post. The string will be wound anticlockwise on machine head posts on the left hand side of the headstock (for 3 a side guitars like most acoustics and 6 in line like most electrics) and will be wound clockwise for the machine heads on the right hand side of the headstock. (more…)

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  3. Compensated Nuts

    February 10, 2010

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    Ever driven yourself insane trying to get the open chords of your guitar to all play in tune and then once you’ve found an acceptable compromise you find the bar chord suck ass?

    Well this can help. When you look at your guitar, do you notice that the bridge saddle/s are further away from the neck on the bass side and closer to the neck on the treble side?

    This is called compensation and it is designed to compensate for the thickness of the strings so that they are as close to being a perfect octave at the 12th fret. The 1000,000.00 question is how do you get them to be in perfect pitch over the rest of the finger board? (more…)

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  4. Handmade Brass Saddle Bridgepieces

    February 5, 2010

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    Up until recently we, like most guitar repair shops replaced bass saddles and telecaster bridge saddles with the best bridge saddles we could find.

    However I’ve never been that happy with the type of brass used, nor the tone it produced. I researched the historical “why’s” and “where fores” of this and found the most interesting thing. The original brass used by the likes of Fender back in the 50’s was actually a softer compound than that which is available today. (more…)

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  5. Full and Partial Refret

    January 10, 2010

    What is a Refret?

    Of all the repair and restoration work we do here Back-Bow Levels and Back Bow Refrets would have to be one of the most common jobs.

    We do a backbow partial refret if:

    •    The first few frets are worn very low due to constant playing.
    •    The angle of the neck to the body is too acute. So instead of resetting the neck, a back-bow partial refret is a cost   effective solution.
    •     The neck is in a sharp up bow and it will take more than just a Backbow Level to fix the problem.
    •    Necks warp and twist for a variety of reasons and if a backbow level is not enough then a backbow partial refret can be. (more…)

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  6. What is a Bridgeplate

    January 3, 2010

    What is a bridge plate?

    The bridge plate is a flat piece of timber or in some cases (i.e. Maton guitars) a laminated piece of timber that is glued to the underside of the sound board directly under the bridge.

    Its primary function is to provide a strong anchor point by which the string tension is dispersed to the soundboard’s bracings and keep the soundboard flat in the area directly surrounding the bridge.

    (more…)

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