New guitar delivered today... anybody want to guess?

[Larry Mal]

But shit, it sounds good.

[oid]

If you shave the bridge you will regret it if this turns into a guitar you will keep, when that neck set finally comes around you will need a new bridge as well.

The glue should be easy to clean, scrape and solvant.

If the action is good now, you have 5 to 10 years before a reset most likely, it depends on how constant the humidity is in your home. Keep it in the case with a good humidification system or a room with a good climate control system and you can likely double that time before a reset.

Gibson's are not really that big of a deal to reset, luthiers just do not like them because the finish is applied after the neck is attached so it often means finish work as well. The clear finished nitro instruments are not really any more work than a Martin as long as one is careful in the neck removal.

[Larry Mal]

Yeah, I'm not super worried about the neck reset, I've got some years before that. It would be nice to think I could lower the action if I wanted, though. It's probably not a big deal.

I don't think I would want to shave the bridge, it's just a possibility. I got it at a pretty good price where if I have to do a neck reset in five years it's not that big of a deal.

The glue only concerns me because it's clearly an amateur job, so what kind of glue is it? Hopefully nothing that's melting the finish under there. It's kind of bullshit that they glued it at all, really, my other (later) Gibson are just held on with a light adhesive so the pickguard is not very much part of the guitar at all- you could just peel them off. I like that better than any glue.

I don't think I will send it back, it's otherwise in great shape, barely any fret wear and the body and finish are great.

And really, I should evaluate it with my ears, and this thing is pretty glorious.

[oid]

It is probably just elmers or the like if it is white, easy to clean off, just need to be patient and work slow.often times it will just pop off clean since most do not bother to properly clean the surface beforehand, but you likely do not want to try that, need some experience so you can feel if it is the glue letting go or the finish.

I would keep it and start a neck reset fund, have it done as soon as that jar has enough nickels and dimes in it. If you think it sounds good now just wait until it has the proper break angle and saddle height. It will be considerably louder and more responsive.

I kind of miss doing neck resets, hearing an old guitar regain it proper voice for the first time in decades is a joy.

Edit: keep forgetting to mention that those are great guitars! One of the handful I have been on the watch for, just waiting for that perfect fixer upper.

[Larry Mal]

Thanks for the advice- the action is fine, it plays great and sounds great. I wish I had a little more time before a neck reset but it is what it is.

So, what do you charge for a neck reset on a Gibson- is it something you do professionally? I've never paid for one, it seems to be about $500 from what I can tell on the internet, but I've never had an exact quote for one done.

This is a nice guitar, I'll give a more accurate NGD at some point when I get strung up and all. So far, though, it's a great sounding instrument. Powerful, not too bass heavy, clear, and surprisingly good for fingerpicking.

I had heard the bubinga was good, I was hoping the Jumbo shape and the different wood would put this in a different zone than my, uh, other four Gibson acoustics and it is.

This guitar is surprisingly good for fingerpicking. I had heard that it was mainly a strumming type body, but it's more versatile than I had thought.

I think I did pretty good. It's a keeper.

[oid]

$500 is the ballpark for a neck reset, generally this will include fretwork, new saddle and nut work, but not always, this generally depends on the condition of the old frets and fretboard, sometimes a refret is the best choice and will cost more, but less than refret in its own. you just need to talk to the luthier, if you have not found a luthier that you like now is the time, bite the bullet and start paying for setups, best way to test em out.

Back when I did this stuff it would be anywhere from a couple hundred to over a grand for a neck reset and the associated work. Low end is a guitar who's neck is already off or loose and I just need to give a whack with a mallet to get it off and then reset and setup. High end is the guitar that needs the works including a new bridge made because the previous owner shaved it down and finish work because the owner wants it to look pristine.

Find a luthier who does not just give flat rates on such things and wants to see the guitar before giving a quote, you are likely to get better service, and if you want to save some cash tell them not to worry about making the neck joint look original, just make it look like a martin.

[Larry Mal]

Thanks for all the advice- I certainly do appreciate it, and you've made me feel a little better about this purchase.

I do have a luthier that I would use for this, he does great work, takes forever, costs a good amount, but he's the guy that I would use for a job like this. The best in town. I talked to him previously about a neck reset but he didn't think it was necessary on that guitar.

So, I'll put this one in the mix. It's a pretty inspiring guitar. I love the sound, it plays great. I wasn't sure if I would love the Jumbo size but I shouldn't have worried, I don't even notice it being any different from any other acoustic I've ever played really.

The neck is tremendous, it's got that good round Gibson thing going on. Pretty thick, like on my J-60.

I didn't want a J-200, I already have a Dove and that's enough maple for me. I didn't think that rosewood would be all that great on one of these Jumbo sized guitars, but it probably would be fine. They tell me that bubinga is pretty close to rosewood and I'd agree with that. It's a clear and strident guitar.

Unlike most of my Gibson acoustics, this actually is the 1.725" nut width that they all advertise themselves as being. Most of the others are actually a little wider, which I like, I prefer a 1.75" but not enough to really get worked up over it or anything.

[oid]

Happy to help.

If you are ok with the down the road cost of the neck reset then you did good. For me this is about the perfect condition for anyone buying old acoustics and has to actually take money into account. The neck reset is near enough in the future that it drops the price a fair amount but it is still fully playable so you can decent idea as to its voice. You can play it for a year and if you still like the sound you can be certain you will absolutely love the sound when you spring for the neck reset, if not it will be an easy sell with no loss,, perhaps a little gain if you are lucky. You also get certain assurances since you have a relationship with the person who will set the neck, so if something goes wrong down the road it will be cheap to free for the repair.

It would not hurt to have your luthier give it a good look over before the return window is up, make sure there are no other costs coming up in the near future. He will check things like the bridge plate, bracing, kerfing, bridge, neck and heel blocks, etc. While it seems like a good deal now, it may not in the near future if it turns out you have a few broken braces, some missing kerfing and missing bridge plate. Chances are you are fine though, but it is fall in the midwest which means it is on the humid side and swollen wood can mask issues that become very obvious once winter rolls around and everything dries out and shrinks.

Gibson really did acoustic necks right, love those things. Your luthier may also be able to address the nut width if you desire, often times you can get the wider spacing on the narrow neck with no issues, it depends on the frets, mainly on the angle of the bevel on the fret ends, some guitars have fairly shallow bevels which makes the usable neck width smaller. So when the neck reset comes around which often also requires new frets your luthier can use slightly lower frets with a steeper bevel angle to regain some width and make a new nut of the spacing you desire.

You have gotten me looking for an old jumbo fixer upper now.

And do not give up on the maple yet, watch out for the Gospel. They were odd ones, 12 fret dreadnoughts with a deeply curved archtop style laminated back, they have a really unique voice, quite unlike anything else, which is probably why they failed. They were Gibsons attempt at a budget guitar that did not compromise tone, and I think it was a massive success in that department, but they looked like dreadnoughts but sounded nothing like that Hummingbird hanging next to it that everyone really wanted, so it failed. Sounds somewhat like a parlor but with the power of a dreadnought and more complex tone, fun things.

[Larry Mal]

I've heard a lot of good things about the Gospel, and I heard a lot of good things about these J-100 Xtras, also.

I've been doing a lot of research into Gibson acoustics lately, and I also was told what a great deal the J-60s were, and that guitar is probably the finest guitar I've ever owned. I am learning that Gibson makes a lot of great acoustics that for whatever reason don't do as good in the marketplace as what they might hope, so the models have erratic and fairly short runs, which can lead to a great guitar that is little known and represents great value.

Same with this J-100, everyone on the internet raves about how great they are and I can see why, looming neck reset or no, this is a great guitar and a good value. I'll give it a play over the weekend, maybe get it into the shop.

Certainly make sure I keep the humidity correct on the guitar over winter, I do a pretty good job of that, I try to keep the humidity of the apartment around 45% anyway- we have radiator heat- and I use case humidifiers anyway. I hope the neck reset is some years off because I won't have much money for that anytime soon, we'll be buying a house shortly and that should leave me with little funds for Gibson neck resets.

But if I can get five years out of it that should be fine.

I was worried when I got it, though, since if the action would have been too high now I would have nowhere to go, so I would have sent it back. But it plays well now, so if I can keep it stable, I'll keep it around. This is a fine Jumbo to keep in the collection. I was curious about these models, I've never had one. But it's a well rounded guitar, not booming, not bass heavy, still has a good amount of dynamic range to it. Definitely not a one trick pony like I was concerned it might be.

[MKR]

sorry if i missed an obvious mention earlier, but what tells you that a neck reset is in the cards? what are the signs that a neck would need resetting?



beautiful guitar by the way. there's something about those jumbo's that is so cool.

[sookwinder]

almost a similar but more general question...
I have 13 50s & 60s Gibson built acoustics and none have ever had a neck reset and none look like they will ever need a neck reset. That's 50 years and no resets.
Yet I also read a lot on the interwebz that neck reset will be needed eventually. Why?
Is it the varying humidity of some locales or is it the absolute humidity value that causes these issues?

This is the humidity where I live:

[Larry Mal]

sorry if i missed an obvious mention earlier, but what tells you that a neck reset is in the cards? what are the signs that a neck would need resetting?



beautiful guitar by the way. there's something about those jumbo's that is so cool.

Over the course of years, the necks on acoustics are pulled upward by the force of the strings. The action gets higher and higher as that happens, and usually you deal with that by pulling the saddle from the bridge and sanding that down.

At some point, though, you don't have any room to sand the saddle down any further or the strings will be laying across the bridge itself. At that point you would either live with very high action or get the neck reset, which involves steaming the neck off the guitar, cleaning the pocket, and re-gluing the neck to the body like how it was originally (or even better than original).

I'll let Oid tell you the rest of the details, that's all I know.

But as you can see from that picture, I don't have any room to sand the saddle down, so if the action was too high now there's nothing I can do about it except spend $500. Luckily it's fine for me, but some years down the road when the inevitable pull of the strings pulls the neck up, there's no room for me to do anything else except have the neck unglued and reset.

Also, like Oid had mentioned, you want to have a good amount of break angle over the saddle ideally so the strings are very tight and can really drive the top of the guitar. That's how it sounds best. So when you buy an acoustic, you want to see a good amount of saddle popping up from the bridge and the action still be decent.

Martin seems to be known for being a little sloppy with how they put the necks on these days, they seem to put them on at a shallow angle. I had a brand new Martin and I had to drop the saddle way down to get only decent action, which meant that it was going to need a neck reset much earlier than it should have.

I have a 1995 J-60, for instance, and it has plenty of time before I would need to reset it (probably). You can expect thirty or forty years before you might need a reset under good circumstances- Oid will tell us if I'm wrong- so this J-100 is needing one a little quicker than I would like. It's only ten years old, I will probably get another five out of it before I care enough to reset it, but that's still pretty quick.

But they all will need it at some point, that's the nature of the beast.

[Larry Mal]

almost a similar but more general question...
I have 13 50s & 60s Gibson built acoustics and none have ever had a neck reset and none look like they will ever need a neck reset. That's 50 years and no resets.
Yet I also read a lot on the interwebz that neck reset will be needed eventually. Why?
Is it the varying humidity of some locales or is it the absolute humidity value that causes these issues?

This is the humidity where I live:

I'll let Oid talk about that in greater detail, but here is the humidity in St. Louis over the year:



You can see that there are times where it is like 0%, all the water is frozen outside. To make matters worse, you'll be heating your home with dry, forced air or radiator heat. I run humidifiers all winter long but a lot of people don't.

Then summer comes and you get the opposite extreme, humidity popping up around 90%.

Where you live seems like ideal guitar weather all year around.

I would still predict you'd need a reset some day, though.

[oid]

This is the humidity where I live:

that is a pretty much perfect humidity for a guitar, assuming you keep your house the same and use a humidifier when the AC is on.

As a guitar dries out during times of low humidity the top sinks down, the sides collapse inwards abit and the strings pull the guitar in on itself. Then as humidity rises the wood swells back up and the guitar attempts to resume its original shape but string tension limits the rebound. The wood can only fight this when its grain runs perpendicular to the strings pull. So the shoulders, sides of the waist and bottom of the guitar where the grain of the sides runs perpendicular to the string tension rely completely on the back and top wood, which is just not enough to fight the tension. This means that the guitar collapses in front of the bridge and rises behind and gives an overall raise in action.

Both string tension and humidity can cause this problem in their own but it is really when they are combined we see the end result.

[Larry Mal]

Still, this guitar might go back anyway.

I am not a fan of the pickguard being glued on with what looks like Elmer's, but they also didn't get the pickguard on accurately:



Not sure if this is just more sloppy gluing or if there was another issue:



The bridge was lifting, which isn't a big deal, but the repair was similarly amateurish like I say:







Now, I'm not panicking about any of this, but the guitar was sold to me as "... It is in MINT condition. There are absolutely no dings, scratches, or imperfections."

And frankly I view having the pickguard glued on amateurishly and incorrectly with Elmer's glue as not being "mint". I understand that I could have my luthier address these issues with this guitar, but I don't feel that should happen on my dime, so if I don't get some kind of compensation regarding that I will say that I did not get the mint guitar that was advertised and will return it.

When I say "compensation" I want everyone to know that I don't like to dick eBay sellers around any more than I've liked being dicked around by buyers. All I'm reaching out for is some advice as to what kind of repair has been done, what glue was used and how extensive it is. If I decide to keep the guitar I might make a move to have my luthier pull the pickguard and affix it properly, to take a look at the bridge and see if it should be addressed, and I will submit an invoice for only that to the seller.

Also I'm a little leery of that part where the neck meets the body and the pickguard. That looks like there might possibly have been some trauma there. I don't know this, but there's enough concerning me here that I want to be sure.

From where I sit, I got an OK deal on this, on the low end of normal. But I feel like I'm looking at a hundred or two hundred dollars in possible repairs right now, assuming I have the bridge pulled and glued in place properly. I don't know this right now, but what I do know is that there is no way I would sell this as mint, and since I can't do that I don't feel I would be able to realize the value of what I paid for this guitar even right now.

And I'm not accepting that.