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This might be a little weird to some, but I played one of these old hoss's at an antique store and I could easily hear the potential that it had, had it not been in such horrendous condition, but the ladder braced tone was something that I really liked, and especially from this size it just had a "thump" to it that I haven't heard from other guitars. These are not the most complex guitars from a tonal perspective but they are ladder braced which gives me a guitar with a tone that I currently do not have.

Ever since I played that antique store model almost 12 years ago I have been seeking one to call my own. What always held me back was usually that these were way overpriced and I wanted something I could put some time into and enjoy the process. In my usual perusing of eBay I spotted this wonderfully relic'd old bird I will name Hoss. Hoss is exactly 17" across, has some fairly serious top damage at the bridge, but on the positive side it has obviously been played and enjoyed immensely over the years. The shipping on this guitar was almost more than what I paid for it from ebay.



The glue in the dovetail completely let go, and the only thing that was holding the neck on was the fingerboard extension. There's alot of damage to the top from some less than ideal construction techniques that you'll see later on.

Besides the AWESOME patina that this thing has, this was my favorite thing about it.


The bridge had been reglued at some point with hide glue I think, and it has obviously let go and it looks like the job was done many moons ago. After removing the screws from the bridge it simply lifted off, the screws were the only thing holding it onto the top which is why there are cracks in that location.


As you can see the ball ends were resting *directly* on the top causing the damage and the enlargement of the holes. I would normally just work from the outside in a case like this but in feeling around there is a large piece of the bridge plate missing and I could feel a large part of the top missing as well. The wood for the plates on these was spruce, not ideal.

The bridge has a few cracks in it, but it's actual old rosewood instead of the usual PMW (painted mystery wood) that usually comes on these. So I will probably try to save it, I've saved worse and with the screws being removed for this rebuild it should be alot more stable.

So I decided to remove the back in order to repair the damage in a manner that will last another 50-70 years.

I initially started to use a seam separation knife and some heat to remove the back but I quickly realized that this was a mistake. The top layer of the laminate back began to peel away and rip up. I quickly changed tactics and decided that it would be safer and easier to saw the back off (YIKES). The kerfing gave me a good amount of space to saw with a little veneer saw. After a while of careful cutting the back popped off. Some damage was already done from where I foolishly tried to separate the seams before. The neck and tail block were both poplar which made them a breeze to cut through. I'll add some shims to make up for the lost portion of wood when the back goes back on. I plan on replacing all the kerfing for the back anyway.



As you can see from the big picture there is an entire section of the bridge plate missing. And upon close inspection you can see how much wear there has been on the top, it's completely elongated the pin holes.



So I plan on rebuilding this whole thing and grafting in a new section of top in the various damaged areas. More to come soon so stay tuned. Really excited for this one! Been a long time coming for me.

I too like that ladder braced sound. Loud and punchy, great blues guitar.

Hey Dan. I got one of these on ebay too back about 2005. I've determined that it was built in 1954. I think it had been hanging on the wall of a bar somewhere before smoking had the nix put on it. It stunk worse than an old ashtray. It took about ten years to out-gas.
It had a pinless bridge that was poorly designed. The string holes were drilled thru it so that the strings were pushed thru from the soundhole side, wrapped around the front and over the saddle effectively leveraging the bridge off of the guitar's top. It also cracked in half thru the boltholes which were all that held it on. Not salvageable. I replaced it with a pinless bridge with a belly. Much better connection and I was better able to get the intonation right. I also retained the fancy bolts.
I also did a neck reset. Does yours have the baseball bat sized neck? Mine had fairly deep, crossgrain gouges on the back so I did a shoeshine sanding to smooth it out and refinished with tru-oil.
I never had the back off, but since you do you might consider X-bracing it. I've read that it can really end up being a tone monster, but granted, no longer that ladder braced flavor.
It's got a cool metal "Kay" on the peghead.
Pics:



One other thing, I've had no luck finding a case for it. If you get that figured out, let me know.

Carl

Carl, That one looks great. I had considered the X bracing conversion but I'm really after that tone that I heard 12 years ago in that dingy little antique store. The one issue I'd have with X bracing this thing is that the top is THICK compared to what I'd like for an X braced instrument.

What I've had in mind though is to find another one and completely retop it with an adi top and Larson brothers style bracing. It's weird but I've always wanted one of the 19" Prairie State instruments so I figured it'd be a cool way to get something similar without the 5 figure price tag that I'll never be able to afford. It'd be sort of a "Poor Man's Prairie State" if you will. These guitars pop up for sale in poor shape fairly often so it'd be easy enough to find another one.

The neck on mine is big but it's not quite baseball bat big.

The back on mine has some finish loss, but I'm fine with it, I don't want the back to be super polished and the top be all ragged, that'd drive me crazy.

I haven't really looked for a case for it, does yours not just fit in a J200 sized case?

No, the upper bouts are so flat on top and so wide that it doesn't fit. I've bought a couple of them , Gator and Access. They did fit a Prairie State style w/17" lower bout and a J-200 finished this year so I wasn't out anything.

Gotcha, I'll see what I can come up with case wise then.

Update time!

The bridge plate peeled off with a little heat and encouragement from a chisel. The old hide glue just pops apart sometimes, spruce as a bridge plate is a bad idea just fyi.

My main concern are these 3 areas. Right in front of the pin holes where the ball ends have chewed through the top completely. And the 2 points where the top has bowed badly from the screws bearing down against in. The wood in front of the pin holes needs something for the new bridge plate to stick to. I may graft in from the top too but I'll do that as final prep before I get the bridge glued on. My method for adding wood is as follows for those interested.

My gouge of choice


These pfeil gouges are too long to fit within the sides to make the cut I need to, so I just pop the blade out of the handle with some strong hits from a mallet and use the blade as is. Very usable and maneuverable in it's short state.





And my relief channel is cut



And of course we need wood to fill our gap with. I super glue a patch of wood onto an angled block and flip the gouge over and cut the fill. Using the same gouge ensures that the channel and the fill are the exact same shape and do not require any fine fitting. You should always check the channel for consistency but if you have a nice wicked sharp tool you shouldn't have many issues.



Some acetone breaks it free from the block



And it's glued in place. I've found that if it's cut well enough then the suction from the glue will hold it in place without the need for much clamping. I clamp anyway because I like to be certain it's seated well.



And skip forward to the next day, after the hide glue has dried and cured the fill is cut flush with the surrounding top.



I also scarfed in some wood on the severe cracks around the screw holes. I really love this method and I adapted it from a method I learned on here years ago about filling in gaps of wood from when a bridge is reset. Exact same idea and it always works great provided that the relief is cut well and that the spruce melds well to the top. The biggest advantage I see with it in repairing cracks is that it adds a nice amount of ridgidity and strength to an otherwise weakened area.

There was a rather large crack in the top I addressed today as well. I decided to recycle that old spruce bridge plate and use it in a spline repair on the crack. I'll add cleats but this crack wasn't going to close even with a good sized bar clamp on the top. So a spline it is.



The problem I noted is that the crack didn't follow a perfectly clean straight line across the top. There were lots of little torn fibers in the crack that would've prevented a spline from being effective. There was also alot of dirt and contamination in the crack. So to give myself a good glue surface I took my little dentist's paddle thingy and carefully cut out some slivers of wood to give me a straighter wall and to give a better glue surface on clean wood.





The spline is trimmed from that piece of the bridge plate I showed earlier. The color match was pretty nice for the top, even without a stain or coloring.



I snap the spline and I've got a pretty good fill that I'm happy with.



I took one of those touchup pens that SM sells and did a quick pass. When you get it in the light just right you can see it easily but if you're looking at it right on it hides nicely.


That's all for now. I'm going to do the tedious task of removing and replacing the kerfing on the back tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Looking great Bro!

That means alot coming from you Hesh so thank you! More updates and work to be done tomorrow.

Very nice work to see. Do you mind saying a bit about how you did the flush cut around the bridge hole repair?
Scraping? Sanding, both? As a new person trying to get scraping down cleanly without impacting any surrounding wood, I'm just curious about your process. Thanks. Roy

Flush cutting anything is best done by plane. I don't sand these repairs as sanding leaves a really uneven surface since our fingers aren't tiny little straightedges.

Scraping is good for removing a tiny bit of material but I almost always plane these down since I get a flatter result. If you cut carefully you won't remove any surrounding wood, remember a plane only cuts the highest point in relation to it's blade/body. As long as you don't bear down on it once it's flush it'll simply stop cutting since the high points are all gone. My experience anyway has been like that.

Some progress, I finished installing the new kerfing and I also completed the final top graft over the second screw hole. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as the other side so the inlay graft didn't have to be as long. I also added small cleats to the large top crack.



And the worst news of this rebuild, the back decided to completely delaminate on me



So now I'm going to have to replace the back. Honestly I don't care if the grain matches the sides or anything of the sort. easiest course of action would be to simply order a pre-thicknessed piece from LMII or the like and re-use the original braces to match the radius from the factory.

Lots more work to be done. Stay tuned.

Been working on this one a bit.

I removed the braces from the old back and got a replacement back for it. Instead of forcing the laminates to close (which never works long term and is way more work than it's worth) I opted to replace the whole thing.

The braces retain their original radius so it's just a matter of gluing them up.The back I got from LMII pre-joined and thicknessed which saves a TON of time. Thanks to LMII for that.



Right now I'm waiting on some radius dishes to re-profile the rim for a good fit to the new back. The kerfing I installed is just basswood so it shouldn't take alot of work to get it done. I also decided to thin the overall depth down to 4". It's something I've wanted to experiment with for a while so no time like the present. What I'm hoping for is for the slightly thinner overall depth to mitigate the "woofiness" that these bigger guitars sometimes have. Hopefully it'll make it a bit more lively, we'll see. If it doesn't I'm not too worried about it as it's all a learning experience.

To lighten the top up a bit I also trimmed down the insanely tall and wide braces. Tapping on the top yields a much different tone than the stock brace height/width gave. More of an experiment to aee what happens, there's so little info I can find on these ladder braced big boys other than converting them to X bracing I figure it'll be worth the info just to try it and see.

For alot (almost all) of these old guitars that had no reinforcement from the factory they suffer from extremely warped and twisted necks (duh) from the years of string tension.

I've experimented with trying to force the necks straight and then adding reinforcement. I recall a while back seeing Barry Daniels do this to a neck on a J45 that was warped beyond belief. In this cause there isn't that level of warpage and instead we just have the typical twist of a guitar of this age.

So rather than force the neck flat and then add reinforcement, I simply cut the slot in the neck and added the reinforcement. Basically I'll leave the twist as is and simply flatten the extremely thick fingerboard to get a flat fret plane. This is way less risky than forcing the neck flat as well.

I originally wanted to add a truss rod to this but I decided against it. I figure I can always add one later should I really want to torture myself down the road.

The carbon rod I chose is an 8x8mm piece I got from a place that sells RC plane parts. Apparently they use these pieces to reinforce wing struts and as such they are very stiff and lightweight. I have a few of the carbon rods that SM sells and just flexing it with my hand it has less flex than the SM pieces and is lighter being hollow. If this works well in this neck then this may be the new thing for me when a neck needs reinforcement but sans a truss rod.

And like a moron when I cut the slot I didn't check the router bit and used one that was *slightly* wider than the 8mm square tube. So I used some maple shims to correct the gap. And I also neglected to get it lined up correctly so it's slightly off center on the dovetail. In the end the only person that will know about it is me so I'm not worried.





More to come. The fretboard is being reglued overnight. Also got the back glue up started, it REALLY sucks not having a go bar deck in the shop for this job. But gotta make do. Will update when more is complete. I'm hoping to have this beast finished by Christmas time as a gift for myself, we'll see!

Alright she now has a back!

The glue up was a bit time consuming since I don't have a go bar deck. So I simply took my radius dishes and glued one half of the back on one day and then the other half the next, I just left the dish on a perch and ran the clamps over the top of the guitar using the radius dish as a giant caul. Worked well but a deck would've been much faster, I really need to build one of those soon. I left as much room for error as possible as it paid off. it's not lacking glue anywhere! I am as happy as a fat caterpillar on a tomato plant about this.



The back I trimmed down with some careful sawing and my little Lie Nielsen violin makers plane (great plane by the way, highly recommended), and a little sanding on the hard corners of the waist. Also slathered on some shellac to seal the wood. I'll probably go back over it with a few hundred layers of garnet shellac later to darken things up.



The tap tone with the new back and the cut down braces no longer has a "thud" that it did before. Now it resonates kind of like a big bass tom drum. There's some ringing overtones that sustain for a bit, I'm not sure if that's a good thing (if you do please say so as I want to learn about this).

I also realized that I'm a moron and didn't get a picture of the braces after they were cut down before I put the back on (doh!). So here's an idea of what I did, you can see the new thin maple bridge plate as well.



The back braces are a bit shorter than the top braces were, but the profile is the same that the top braces had originally. The new profile is significantly thinner, tapers to the top but the width at the base wasn't changed at all. Just trying to lighten up the top a little bit from the "towering log" style bracing that it had originally.

The fingerboard is also back on. Funny thing is for a moment I was completely convinced that I'd seriously screwed up the fingerboard location because I kept trying to measure out the scale length from the end of the fretboard and it kept coming out at 26"-ish inches. I thought I was going to have to remove the board again and glue it on until I finally remembered to measure from the nut to the 12th and...



It's a 25.75" scale. I was relieved that I hadn't messed up that badly. I kept thinking "this is *SO* bad!" because I had used pins in the 12th and 1st fret slots upon removal so that it'd go back in correctly. I breathed a sigh of relief and went about my day.

Right now I have shims on the dovetail drying to refit it to the neck block. This neck is of course twisted but with the carbon in place I'll definitely be flattening it before I cut it to the new angle, the twist makes it nearly impossible to get a good idea of the projection for the new bridge.

Anyways, more to come, I am thrilled that it's come this far and we're getting close to the end now!

Alright got the neck fit with the new angle. Some flattening was done before hand so that the straight edge wasn't reading all wonky when checking the projection. Also fit some new dots and radiused the board to 15'. No real reason other than I've been preferring flatter radii on the fretboards as of late and 15' leaves some space for a compound on the higher frets when it comes time to level. The original radius was all over the place, at one spot it was 7.25 and another it was 10, gotta love the quality.



I've also been working on not using the "fret slot cleaning tool" as I've noticed on some fretboards it increases the chances of causing chips if the slot is too narrow. So I just fire up the shop vac and using a stiff bristle paintbrush and suck out as much of the dust as possible.



One problem I ran into with the longer scale is that the original bridge would've had the saddle right up against the low E with no space for relief. I don't like the idea of a broken bridge from the saddle height so I decided to widen the new saddle to push the pins back just a smidge so the saddle will have some space.



Leaving the bridge high I can cut it down a bit once it's on the guitar should I need to. Right now she's all glued up and the fretwork has started. Really cutting it close to get this finished before Christmas with all the other work that needs doing. We'll see. More to come soon.

That is looking good Dan.

Alright update time. She's done!



I got it all finished up just barely in time for Christmas, so this does count as a gift to myself, so the wife's off the hook this year. For some vintage vibes I went with a through saddle with some gibson-esque stylings to the curves where it blends into the bridge (all that means is I cut the square corners with a file lol).



I didn't feel like purchasing and waiting for tuners to arrive so I simply cherry picked some good ones from my stock. Also the 3 on a plate style tuners always seem to have plastic buttons which I despise so I went with the metal buttons just for strength.



An obligatory "sexy new fret" shot. I am definitely happy with the 6150 size wire. the factory wire was wider but not as tall so it looks fairly stock but definitely plays 10x better with the flatter radius.



I do have to give the original builder's some credit. The fact that the fingerboard was SO thick gave me more than enough space to correct the twist that this neck had taken over the years. No reinforcement and likely being kept in a less than ideal environment definitely took it's toll. In this shot you can see how much the headstock had twisted in relation to the body, pretty drastic.



And while it's *very* hard to see in pictures you can see the very slight relief I have with the carbon rod and the new neck angle.



The carbon I used doesn't seem to make the neck overly rigid, there's still some flex but it's not immobile. It'll be a long term thing but if it works I'll be fine with it as is. The action with the saddle high is extremely nice with some space to dig in with some room to adjust should I want it lower.

And a small soundclip for those interested

https://imgur.com/thj6RKG

Anyways, going to go back to playing it for a bit. Merry Christmas all and thanks for following along on this project. I'm sure there'll be many more to come.

Nice Dan. Merry Christmas!

_________________
Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I like it. Long live the old Kays!

Indeed!