danw
cheap bastard
Well, new to me, anyway -- this is more of a nursing-back-to-health case. A few weeks ago my neighbor gave me an old 12-string that had been sitting in his basement for 20 or so years. Said he had gotten it for his ex-wife many years ago, but her hands were too small to play it, so it never really got used. The sticker on the headstock says "trump." As far as I can tell it's a student-level import from the 70's. It was in some disrepair -- the fretboard had popped most of the way off, and the soundboard was bellied up pretty bad from years of string tension. My guess is that bellying had caused the action to get unplayably high, and the previous owner had tried to correct the problem by truss-rodding the neck into backbow. The truss rod was so tight I had to take it out and put it in a vise to break it loose. I slowly pried the fretboard off using a hairdryer on full blast to heat up the glue joint, then scraped the glue off and reattached the board with hot hide glue. I installed one of those JLD bridge doctors below the bridge, which did a pretty good job of correcting the warp in the soundboard -- the action is actually a little better now than my other acoustic. Finally, I replaced the crummy plastic saddle it came with with a new bone one. The thing sounds great to me -- and all for maybe 30 bucks in parts and a couple of weekends.
