Worn out frets :: 2010 Chubbuck Mousa 001

March 30, 2016

Six years of heavy daily playing has this guy back in the shop for new frets. I love how well this guitar has held up over the years, especially with how heavily Andy Mowatt gigs. Below you can see it's little brother Mousa 003 on the bench just before the neck was glued to the body.

Videos from the daily vlog of pulling the old frets and then leveling, crowning and fret end dressing of the new ones.

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G&L ASAT Bass [9.2 lbs] :: setup

March 30, 2016

An EMG loaded Tele body bass in for a setup. The player is fairly heavy handed with a pick so the setup is a little higher than the previous run of basses coming through the shop.

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Custom Bartolini pickguard mount :: 2009 Eastman Pagelli PG2 [5.1 lbs]

March 21, 2016

A noisy pickup was found to be the cause of a loud buzz / hum while playing unless the tone was rolled completely down. The pickup was both screwed and glued to the pickguard, so heat was required to remove the pickup. The player chose to replace the Kent Armstrong pickup with a Bartolini 5J. Unfortunately, Bartolini only offers a fingerboard mount so I needed to make a custom pickguard mounting bracket out of brass.

The fret ends were sharp in the cutaway so they were dressed and the guitar strung up with flats.

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K&K Devinity pickup & new frets :: 1939 Gibson L-7 [5.5 lbs]

March 20, 2016

A big and beautiful 1939 L-7 archtop on the bench for a bunch of repairs. You can see some of the work done here. These repairs include new frets, new relic Waverly tuners, back binding repairs, side cracks and a K&K Devinity system pickup installation. I must say that I'm not normally impressed with acoustic pickups but this newer K&K pickup sounds very warm and transparent. I installed one of the older K&K archtop pickups in a 1940's Epiphone Emperor years ago and found it sounded very hollow and out of phase (even with correcting the phase with a preamp). Archtops can be difficult to amplify acoustically. After hearing this pickup I recommend that you give the K&K Devinity a try.

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Hollowbody neck pocket :: Chubbuck Mousa 003

March 19, 2016

Easily the most nerve racking part of my hollowbody builds is routing the neck pocket. This is where hours of hard work spent getting to this point can be thrown away in a second should something go wrong. Since I build by hand without a pin router (or CNC), above is my funky jig for laying out the pocket. It is pretty much just two supports to hold / align the neck and a flat platform in which to support a plunge router over the body.