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About a year ago I closed a box. Upon inspection I discovered SOMEONE forgot to glue in a bridge plate!!!!


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I was introduced to this concept on the very first guitar I built. I swear I measured twice and cut once but somehow I managed to to cut the bent sides about 2 inches short at the tail end. After puzzling over it for a while, I made a new wider tail block so that the ends of the sides would overlap it and filled in the gap with a bookmatched piece made from the offcuts from the back plates. Not what I had in mind originally, but not bad.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

You pulled that one off nicely Rocher...



Nothing like a good lesson in guitar repair.

Yes well I discovered a good one today. I am working on a tenor guitar, due at Easter so now overdue and anxious to finish. Up to body sanded, neck fitted with truss rod installed and fingerboard glued on. Sanded and pore filled the neck yesterday, everything going fine, feeling good. So today just to be sure everything was ok before gluing end of the fingerboard, try adjusting the truss rod (through the sound hole). Dammit, can't get the wrench into the truss rod nut no matter how hard I try, even though I tested it dry fitted and it slid in easily. The wrench also slides in deeper than it should. What the?? Fortunately it is a bolt on neck so take the neck off and the truss rod is upside down. No way will the wrench fit onto the nut. Truss rod won't budge, so out with the hot iron and take the fingerboard off. Grrrr. At least it can be fixed and not something fatal, although there have been plenty of those.

That's a nice looking tool. When I did some sawed of neck reset bolt on conversions I made this little cutter from a spade bit.

Oh yes I did. Lols...




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Tonight may have been the most soul-crushing oops of my luthiery career yet.

I’m building a pair of guitars at the moment. I don’t have a lot of finesse when it comes to profiling the rim. I guesstimate it close with the block plane, then muscle it home driving the bus. Facing the prospect of doing it again so soon on the second, I finally hunkered down and made proper profiling templates and felt ridiculously slick after profiling the back of the rim so quickly after planing it down within 1/16” of the line.

Then I realized I’d used the wrong dish.

Thankfully I still have plenty of room to work, but sanding the proper radius in after feeling like I’d finally wisened up is soul-crushing!


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Glad to hear you can recover from that. I've caught myself starting to drive the bus on the wrong dish more than one time.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

This is a great thread. I am seeing crushing mistakes - which makes me feel not so alone. I am also seeing miraculous recoveries - like Ed’s masterful 3-piece back. It looks like he planned it that way all along. There is hope after all!

Whenever I make a mistake that seems "fatal" I set the project aside (rather than throwing it on the floor and stomping on it. ) Usually after a day or a week or a month I think of a solution or re-purpose the materials into something more positive.
But it seems as often as I learn from my mistakes, I learn how to make new ones.

I had a rough one last Friday. I was cutting binding channels on the back of a guitar, using a tower and carriage setup, when I misjudged the grip I had on the body carriage during a climb-cut section (widest lower bout point to tail block). The bit climbed, and climbed some more. The predictable result was a hole in the back, near the tail block.

After destroying a perfectly innocent board of poplar by beating it against the cast iron legs of my workbench (I’m not proud of the need for that level of steam venting), I planned and started the fix: replacing the back. I guess I needed to learn how to do it at some point.

Since I build with hide glue, this has gone pretty smoothly. A heat gun and frosting knife made quick work of the removal of the damaged back. I jointed and glued up the back, thicknessed it, cut it to the right shape, glued on the marriage strip, cut the new brace stock, glued on the braces, replaced the sections of kerfed lining that mated with the damaged back, carved the braces, reprofiled the rim, and fitted the brace ends into the replacement kerfed lining sections. I’ll have time to clean up and sand the back for gluing it on this Friday. So, I basically lost a week to this flub.

It’s an expensive way to learn the lesson of always keeping a tight grip during the necessary evil of a climb cut, but I have learned it, for sure.

Hi Don,
Don't think of it as an expensive loss of a back, but rather the beginnings of a parlor guitar, or if it was on a parlor guitar, the beginnings of a terz. The smallest guitar I know of is a quint, but you would have to mess up a few more times to get down to that.
My most recent screw up was letting the humidity drop to zero in my "climate controlled closet" and having the braces pop loose from the back I wanted to glue to the rims.

Thanks, Clay! Maybe I need to build a ukulele . . . I loosened the center seam at the ends while getting the back off, and the bracing will have to come off anyway, so I might as well take the whole back down to its component parts and keep them handy for whatever. I now have a nice set of orphaned EIR sides, too. Ukulele sides plus some head plates, bridge plates, etc., maybe. We’ll see. The important part is that the guitar body was otherwise unharmed. I really like this top, so I’m glad the mayhem was contained to the back.

Hey Don,
LMII shows an orphan back on their website.

Can I just say I love that this is titled the dum dum “tread”. If it was on purpose I’m sorry I explained the joke. If it was accidental it’s perfection.


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When I trim the sides for the end block I cut one side to center line put that cut side back in the mold and use it to mark the other side for cutting. Imagine my surprise after I learned I put the cut side inside the uncut side and used the uncut side to mark and then I cut the all ready cut side, about 2 inches too short. That is a dum dum mistake.

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Sounds like another start of a parlor guitar. You guys are on a roll!
(if the side is too short for a parlor I can send you a tracing for a terz)
If I don't screw up on at least one thing during a build I don't feel like I've accomplished anything.

Really like the three piece back save, nicely done!

I had a solution somewhat like J De. Given that I had enough wood I made it look somewhat intentional.

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LOOOOOOOOOOL!

Hint: It was perfection.

I had a solution somewhat like J De. Given that I had enough wood I made it look somewhat intentional.

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Ha! I wondered a little bit about that when I saw this photo posted on the Seattle Luthiers Group facebook page.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Might as well jump into this pool of familiar waters.

Had a young client in the shop a couple weeks back who wanted to do a little hands-on with their guitar. Figured there were plenty of good, safe places to do a little work so we decided on gluing some top braces on. I use a solara with pretty clear markings, so I set it up in the deck and we did a couple dry runs putting the transverse on the solara and setting the go bars in.

Was going so well, I said now go ahead and use the hide glue. Once it was all braced in we looked at it and I said "great job".... then I realized something important. The top was sitting behind me on the table saw.

I really appreciated my hide glue that day.

When I entered the shop yesterday, I checked my brain at the door. The first effort is on the bottom. It's a good thing that ebony scraps are cheap.

That's a good one!

&$#@!
First time I did that.

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My memory is so good, sometimes I remember things that never happened.