Tag: Guitar repair

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Fixing a Guitar Neck Ding…

National Resophonic M1 Tricone

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I first started playing my guitars on stage around mic stands, because of inexperience, I unfortunately whacked my guitar’s neck into the stand, which leaves a small ding. Difficult to see, but irritating when moving your hand up and down the neck, particularly when playing with a slide. While the guitar is still playable and the tone is not adversely affected, it is really annoying and distracting to feel the ding during playing. It’s particularly frustrating when playing a premium guitar knowing how expensive it can be.

I was playing my National M1 the other day and was immediately reminded of the ding(s) I had in the neck. One ding from a mic stand strike and another from my friend’s careless swing of his guitar neck onto mine, which is doubly irritating!

Cue Doctor Ding Remover

Driven by my irritation, I started rooting around on the internet for a solution and discovered multiple remedies for ding repair. Several involved application of moisture and heat which I did not want to mess with for fear of exacerbating the damage. Fortunately, I did stumble on a relatively inexpensive mechanical solution that was worth a try.

The Cue Doctor is a dense and solid cylinder of glass that is intended to remove dings in pool cues. Apparently a ding on a pool cue is as irritating and distracting as one on a guitar neck. The device is very simple to use. Holding the cylinder in the palm of your hand and rapidly rubbing it over the ding with a modicum of pressure will flatten out the damage. According to the manufacturer the combination of pressure and heat created by the friction of rubbing will cause the indent to rise and flatten out.

Some luthiers have taken the same technology and applied it to guitar necks. I did the same to the M1’s neck and it works amazingly well!

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Guitars and the company’s that support their product…

I do not own a Martin guitar, but there are enough well-established guitarists who swear by them to make me believe that to certain players they possess their share of fairy dust and music magic. I think the same is true for Gibson guitars too, both acoustic and electric.

Me… I prefer Taylor guitars… On and off through the years, I’ve owned eight of them. My first serious solid wood acoustic guitar was a Taylor that I used to replace a starter Yamaha back around 1994. That was a spruce and mahogany large bodied “dread” best used for flat-picking. It was traded a long time ago but is probably still serving someone well because Taylor builds an excellent instrument. Since that time, I’ve accumulated two Taylor acoustics and three electrics, and then there’s another Taylor acoustic that I handed down to my son Parker.

Taylor 510, like my first purchase…

Acoustic guitars (and for that matter electrics) produce their own idiosyncratic sounds based upon design philosophy, so Taylor’s, Martin’s and Gibson’s all have their own characteristic tones. For me the Taylor’s offer a nicely balanced tonal range and great presence so they just appeal to my ear. If you ever become more interested in Taylor Guitars there is a wonderful memoir by Bob Taylor about the founding of the company.

Bob Taylor memoir… an excellent read…

Beyond the instrument itself, another thing I love about Taylor guitars is the support offered by the company itself. I’ve had two instruments that required repair, both of which did not fall strictly within their warranty; however they stood by their product and repaired them (actually as I write one is currently in for repair, but that’s another story), just charging me for shipping to and from California where their main factory is located. For me, that kind of product support is a huge difference maker.

This morning I discovered the below attached video demonstrating the periodic maintenance that an acoustic guitar requires. In this case it is a Martin having some neck, nut and bridge repair work done at their home factory in Pennsylvania. My small bodied Taylor 812 required bridge replacement similar to what’s seen in this video. A large chip broke off the bridge when I was changing its strings. Taylor did a lovely job replacing it. You can surmise in this posting as well as elsewhere in this weblog, I am quite fond of Taylor Guitars.