Here's some "before" shots:
This one needed to have a neck plate & original tuners tracked down, the headstock plugged and redrilled (it was drilled for modern "F" tuners,) and a repair for a nasty crack in the body.
It took a whole mess of ratchet straps to pull closed the crack in the body. I used a glue syringe to try and force glue into the crack. Luckily it held after the glue dried!
It looked quite a bit better with the crack glued closed, but I still needed to patch the big chip of wood that had gone missing. I clamped the body into the mill and machined away the broken stuff to make way for a tiny rectangular patch. The chunk of alder needed to be cut at a diagonal for the grain to match the grain in the body.
...and another ratchet clamp for the patch.
It looked pretty nice after the patch was trimmed and sanded to match the shape of the body. I painted the patch with some black lacquer, and after that dries for a couple weeks I'll level the lacquer and buff it to match the rest of the paint.
I needed some plugs to patch the headstock but I couldn't find a plug cutter that was the right size, so I turned a bunch of plugs on the lathe by screwing some pieces of wood to a scrap of plastic.
Plugs that fit!
All plugged up:
I shaved the plugs flush with the headstock and then redrilled the holes on the mill:
Also, the pickguard was pretty warped, so I flattened it out in the oven:
It's together and working pretty well - I can see how it got so worn-looking in the first place!
XII's
