Did I ever tell you guys about the time...

[Steenamaroo]

...I pulled the neck off a 1972 Yamaha FG-180 and reset it, and replaced the bridge?

There's a full gallery of images here.
Edit: I own the server and wrote the page ^^. It's clean.

The bridge was replaced for two reasons. First, it had been sanded down to claw back some action, postponing a neck reset,
but also the spacing of the strings on that guitar was quite narrow for my fat hands, so I filled the holes and redrilled, getting the string spacing as wide as I could.


It's been months now and she's still playing beautifully!

It's amazing how intensely focussed you can become on something.
No matter how good I got it I was convinced that the action was higher than it should be,
then I lifted my strat and realised that it was much higher!

 

[Nola]

Nice. Do those have epoxy that makes it hard to take off or is it hide glue? What did you use to heat it?
My FG-400 needs a reset and new bridge. I'm afraid to deal with the epoxy in that neck joint!

 

[Steenamaroo]

I was told that the chances were mine would be epoxied, but it was soft rubbery glue when I got it apart.
Was very pleasantly surprised!!

Heh..Yeah, the pics don't show my super-fancy-expensive steaming apparatus.
It's a handheld home steamcleaner with a football pump needle screwed in to the nozzle.

It spat a little bit but, to be honest, it worked really well and pretty quickly.

One of the holes I drilled was perfect, and the other wasn't quite, which is why one side of the neck joint got soaked and went soft as shit, I guess.
Maybe a proper steamer would have helped with that...Not sure.

 

[Nola]

Cool. I've heard of people using hair dryers and irons and loosen the joint.
This makes me want to go for it...it's my first guitar so if I ruin it it'll be a sad day.
In your photo where you're holding the straight edge over the bridge, it looks to be going over the bridge a few mm extra (i.e. too high). Was that the height it was ultimately set, or did you sort that out?
How difficult was the job? Oh, and where did you get that bridge clamp? That looks like a nice one. I see a lot of junk online.

 

[Steenamaroo]

Cool. I've heard of people using hair dryers and irons and loosen the joint.
This makes me want to go for it...it's my first guitar so if I ruin it it'll be a sad day.

Oh, wow..Yeah, I can't see that cutting it. For the bridge, sure. I used a clothing iron and a piece of cloth to heat that up,
but for the neck joint direct injection of steam seems like it would be necessary.

In your photo where you're holding the straight edge over the bridge, it looks to be going over the bridge a few mm extra (i.e. too high). Was that the height it was ultimately set, or did you sort that out?

What's pictured there is what I went with.
As far as I know just landing on top of, or ever so slightly above, the bridge is ideal.
My guitar has a bit of a belly-bow which relaxed when the tension was taken off, so I roughly measured the contour before and after and made an educated guess about how much to overshoot by.
As you can see from the final pics, it came out just right.

How difficult was the job?

I suppose it's relative. I found the actual doing pretty easy.
The key, having no experience, was watching a hundred videos of other guys doing it, and taking lots of time over it.
Patience, particularly with shaping the joint, was a big deal.
Chalk, dry fit, remove, sand, repeat x 100.

That's not to say I didn't make mistakes or learn things, though.
For one, the bridge wasn't heated enough so it took some chunks of the top layer with it. That was definitely not ideal.
Where the neck meets the body I have a few small chips in the neck lacquer. That's from not cutting deep enough with the scalpel before hand.
I thought I was through it; Now I know I wasn't.
To be fair, though, I've seen much worse online!!
Finally the shim that I made for under the fretboard tongue was ever so slightly too thick.
Were talking fractions of a mm but it resulted in one fret needing a file after wards.
Given that most probably completely re-fret afterwards, though, I'm pretty happy overall.

Nothing end-of-the-world there, but things learned for sure.

That looks like a nice one. I see a lot of junk online.

The grey metal clamp? I snagged that on ebay for £18!
Anything with luthier in the title was £40 +!
The rest is a scrap of wood and a few nuts+bolts from my garage.
Solid metal would, no doubt, be a better job, (same for the caul) but it still worked well.

Using little shims to wedge in between the bolts was an after thought that I picked up somewhere.
A little extra glue did squeeze out when I added those so I think it was worth doing.

 

[Nola]

Sweet, nice work all around for a first try.
I've watched so many videos on this because my Yamaha needs it, so I kinda know what to do (in theory), but I've been too afraid to attempt it so far. There was a $10 acoustic on CL recently that would have been perfect to attempt first surgery on, but the guy wouldn't write me back!

 

[Steenamaroo]

Sweet, nice work all around for a first try.
I've watched so many videos on this because my Yamaha needs it, so I kinda know what to do (in theory), but I've been too afraid to attempt it so far. There was a $10 acoustic on CL recently that would have been perfect to attempt first surgery on, but the guy wouldn't write me back!

I think that's a great idea, trying on a throw-away guitar, and it was my original plan but for whatever reason I ended up diving in.
Stating the obvious but getting the neck off is the one bit where you don't control if it's going to work well or not.
Once that's off, everything else is on your time and your terms.

If you're the handy type it wasn't all that hard but, yeah, although mine went well I'd recommend the trial-run approach.

 

[jimmys69]

Awesome! I bet I heard a track with that guitar played.