Neck strip, oil & fret level :: 1982 Yamaha BB2000 [9.9 lbs]

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A neck-through early 80's Japanese Yamaha PJ (note the reverse P pickup) in for a neck strip and refinished with Tung oil.  There is some nice birdseye figure in this neck that didn't really show until I stripped the thick poly and started to apply the oil.  During the setup I found many uneven frets so a level, crown and polish was required to get the action super low for this player.  With older guitars, often the screws are an odd assortment of non-originals.  This was missing a few pickup screws that needed to be replaced with the proper metric ones.  The bridge pickup even had a coarse wood screw holding it in place.  Thankfully the pickup threads were not damaged (somehow) and cleanly accepted a new screw.  The side-mounted output jack plate also fell victim to the random screw swapping so I replaced them all with a matching quartet.

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Video of the fret level and neck strip from the vlog below.

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Loose Neck Joint & Bridge Fit :: 1960's Aria Barney Kessel [5.7 lbs]

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Loose Neck Joint & Bridge Fit :: 1960's Aria Barney Kessel [5.7 lbs]

The bridge foot needed to be refit along with a loose neck block re-glued to the top.  The neck pickup was also freaking out, causing feedback and out-of-phase output issues.  I found that the metal cover was split and there was a small section that was vibrating and inducing signal into the pickup.  To fix this I ended up lightly hot gluing the broken cover to keep it in place.  A bone new nut finished off the setup.

Loose Neck Block :: 1960's Aria Barney Kessel

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Loose Neck Block :: 1960's Aria Barney Kessel

The top is separated from the neck block and not providing much strength for the bolt on neck joint. Here I'm clamping the neck back to realign the top while gluing and clamping the loose area.  The neck block had slipped so much that there was a significant stack of shims in the neck pocket to account for the fallen neck angle.

The bridge is also being refit on this hollowbody.

Bad Bridge Fit :: 1960's Aria Barney Kessel

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Bad Bridge Fit :: 1960's Aria Barney Kessel

The floating archtop bridge foot has what I'm guessing is green felt soaked with superglue.  Though the bridge foot is fairly thin, I'll try to burn through most of this nastiness while improving the fit with the top.

1960's Teisco May Queen [7.6 lbs] :: rewire & setup

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1960's Teisco May Queen [7.6 lbs] :: rewire and setup

A player found this in the trash and brought it by to get it playing.  The electronics were rewired and the frets were loose and glued down.  I shot another quick video to keep up on my video editing practice so keep an eye out for it on the blog.