Part Two: Surgery#

As I mentioned previously I was going to work on my existing guitar a little bit before searching out a new one.

A smiple procedure: restring, and while the strings were off, take off the pick guard to take a liitle looksie inside to see if we could figure out why the jack crackles occasionally.

But first, we set our scene in fair Verona:

I had to decide on some operating room music. I went with Bat Out of Hell, a long time favorite from my childhood, and Sadao Watanabe’s Rendezvous, which I have not listened to before.

Quick aside about Bat Out Of Hell - This album is/was a favorite of my mom’s, and when I was younger (6 or 7? maybe a few years older) she was making mix tapes for my sibling and I based on requests from our family CD collection. We both had personal tape players so I think my mom’s idea was if we picked our own songs and had a tape we could listen to individually we wouldn’t all be fighting over what CD was in the living room stereo. Anyway, she asked what song I wanted next and I wanted the title song Bat Out of Hell, but being a kid I didn’t think I could say “Hell” in my response so it was a lot of “that song” (pointing at the title) or “the first song” as we played a bad rendition of “Who’s On First” (As written by Jim Steinman and performed by Meat Loaf).

I also needed to be properly hydrated while working:

So we can begin.

Like a surgeon#

Got my tools, got my strings, I 3d printed a neck rest, I’m ready to go.

Unwinding and cutting the strings felt a little … wrong? I don’t know. Like I was at the edge of “what I knew about guitar maintenance” and “what the hell am I doing?” But at that point it was no going back, no chickening out. I broke it, so now I had to buy it (with blood, sweat, and tears).

In doing so, I didn’t realize my wraparound bridge would pop right off, but there it did. However, that does give me a better view of the thing, and a couple of possible parts numbers or serial numbers. Looking online, recasts of these are in the $180 range.

Underneath it all#

Unscrewing the pick guard and opening it up gives me a couple more serial numbers, and the model number (which we already knew). It’s nice to know Good Ol’ Number 26 inspected this unit.

I didn’t really get a good photo of the jack itself, but looking at it while the guard was open I didn’t see anything necessarily bent out of position. I did use a wrench to tighten the nut around the jack more than I could by hand though, in case that was the issue.

It was at about this point I switched over to the Sadao Watanabe tape. It was quite enjoyable.

Finger lickin'#

With one issue (hopefully) taken care of, I moved on to cleaning the guitar the best I could before restringing it. The body and guard had some light dust that was easy to clean up, but I also took a crack at the fretboard which was a little gunky. A combination of scraping off finger gunk and some microcloth cleaning with water and alcohol seemed to improve it, at least. (This is the before photo)

And really, stringing it back up took the longest time. I wasn’t entirelly sure what I was doing so I was tightening slowly and then tuning slowly - turns out I was told after the fact that once you have the strings on you can just give them a heave and pull them out perpendicularly to speed up the stretching process. I didn’t know that at the time and instead slowly tuned them (as it felt like every knob twist the strings were going to snap) and then by the time I got done tuning all 6 strings I could start over because they’d stretched some more.

All in all though, mission accomplished. New strings on, it stays in tune, and it plays. Now on the hunt for a guitar to really get weird with.

If you want to get ahold of me, you can now reach me at floppyparts@proton.me. Send me whatever you want.