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Had a high-end acoustic in yesterday for intonation issues. This guitar was built by a well known small builder. It's also BRW and Adi with some very nice BRW the kind of stuff you rarely see these days.

The guitar is a mess and has a number of major issues such as loose frets with evidence that they were always loose..., an inaccessible truss rod set-up and a truss rod adjustor that missed the access hole, nut spacing way too close to the treble side of the neck, a nut that fell off in my hand when I tugged on it... and worse.

An intonation check revealed it was 9 cents out on the treble side and 14 cents out on the bass side. This is what the client was complaining about and he was correct this guitar is messed up.

The bridge is a very narrow sort so no room to plug and move the saddle and that's what's necessary because the builder improperly located the saddle/bridge by .120". The other approach which we are not going to take is remove the bridge, refinish the top, reglue the bridge in the proper location.

This is inexcusable for someone selling their instruments to make such a sophomoric mistake as to put the bridge on the top this far out.....

The owner wants it out of his life and he's going to flip it and cut his losses. And out in the wild it goes again to disappoint someone else and give the concept and industry of small builders a bad name....... We have turned the owner down that he can't use our name with prospective buyers, we do not want to get any on us.....

Everyone loses because someone let something out of their shop, wasted some rare an scarce BRW and Adi on it and was basically, no other way to say it, quick to make a buck.....

So even though many here see building guitars as a woodworking project if your stuff goes out in the wild it will likely end up in the hands of a thing called..... a musician . And musicians see guitars not as woodworking projects but as "tools" for them to have the pleasure of having the opportunity to make the rest of us happy with their tunes.

Our client is not going to flip this pos because it's a woodworking project he's flipping it because it can't cut it as a musical instrument.

With all this said if you are selling or fancy selling please do what it takes so that the value that you provide is real and the workmanship that you offer is decent or better and most of all please get some of the critical things right such as neck angles and bridge locations. Everyone loses when we don't.

Additionally nuts, saddles, fret work are all part of the human interface to the instrument and something a player will appreciate, or not... nearly at once.

So sad day here yesterday not unlike officiating at the demise of a friend. A potentially beautiful and great playing and sounding guitar let out of the shop with major issues and likely passed around for over a decade from owner to owner because it sounds..... terrible.

Thanks

I have seen things too. Electric with the nut cut 1/16 too short.

these are not something a builder should let out of the shop.

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
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You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

Did you contact the builder? Seems like the ideal solution would be to send it back to them for rework.

Is the bridge too close to the neck or too far? If too close (and especially if the nut-to-1st fret distance is also shorter than usual), it was probably designed for nut compensation and someone else has made a non-compensated nut for it.

That is also for nut compensation. You can blame Trevor and Gerard for ruining the industry
Hopefully repair people will become accustomed eventually, because nut compensation is awesome. No more B string compromise between open and fretted intonation.

The same thing came to mind for me. Even if it is not necessarily the case for the guitar Hesh is talking about, it is an important thing for repair people to know about. For decades now, Greg Byers' method of compensating the nut and saddle has been pretty widely used in classical guitars, and produces a a guitar that plays in tune nicely. But much like you said, if someone unknowingly swapped out the compensated nut and saddle for normal ones (or even changed string tension, or from nylon to carbon) there will be errors. And if they decided to measure from the nut to the saddle it would appear there is no compensation at all.

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Also, measuring nut to 12th fret doesn't give you half the scale length like usual. One unambiguous method is to measure 1st to 13th fret and multiply by 12th root of 2 (1.05946).

Perhaps I should start adding notes to the label inside, like "650mm scale, compensated nut" to assist future technicians... That still doesn't make it clear why there's less saddle compensation than usual, though. Not sure if that can be adequately explained in such a small space.

I've fixed this problem before by filling in the peg holes and making a new and bigger bridge with the saddle cut in the right spot. I can't imagine how a well known builder would make a mistake like that. Every introduction builder book out there has a concise discussion about compensation.

The point of the post is how sad it is when a builder lets something out of their shop that is so clearly defective. Additionally it's also sad at least to me when our scarce and even coveted resources such as BRW are wasted on a guitar that no one wants to play or own.

When this happens it creates distrust of small builders and Luthiers in general and my hope by posting this sad story here is that we all, all of us including me will continue to embrace a strong work ethic and reverence for high quality work.

That's all. Don't need repair advice we know the fix but we were not asked to do it as I mentioned. Nut compensation should never be necessary on a conventional steel string with conventional tunings. Some believe in it and it does have a place in the classical, high nut slot, stretchy string world. Not necessary in the steel string world with rare exceptions. It's far easier... to put your frets in the right place, saddle too... and cut nut slots properly.

Nut compensation should never be a goto solution for improperly locating saddles or frets or nuts. Instead do better work in the first place.....

FYI the solution is what JF is close to having here. Remove bridge, refinish top, position and glue original bridge properly IN THE CORRECT position... We're not doing it though nor has it been authorized or requested. This one will be someone else's sad story sadly....

One last comment from me so far... When you take your car into a shop for an oil change and tire rotation is it OK with you if the shop without asking you paints the car, rebuilds the slipping transmission and tunes up the motor and then bills you $4,573.21 for the unauthorized work? What happens if you damage the car along the way of doing unauthorized things?

What I am describing here is a professional interaction between client and instrument. How fast some are to dive in when that is not what's even being discussed here is rather disturbing.....

Hopefully you take it upon yourself to inform the builder, who may not know what they don’t know, as the saying goes. Otherwise that person will possibly continue to fabricate the same error without knowing they are doing it. I don’t deal with a large amount of repairs, but I have over the course of time seen a lot of high dollar A list guitars come across my bench for reasons. Combined with the number of famous builders guitars that I’ve encountered at the various shows, it has lead me to realize that high prices and high quality are not directly related (though there is often correlation). A lot of times high end prices are demanded by builders with very low body counts.

It serves no one to return this instrument to the wild without correction, and in fact if the owner sells it on without informing potential buyers of the problem, well, I’d take a pretty dim view of a transaction like that, but that’s just me and where my ethics lie.

It could be, that informed of the problem, the builder may fall all over themselves in an effort to correct said problems. Particularly as this is a problem of numbers and not one of personal subjectivity like tone or artistry. The numbers need to be right and if they’re not, they’re not, and that can be conveyed factually without raising emotion. Possibly…

I certainly could be wrong and the builder really is just incompetent, but bridge .120" closer to the neck than usual is correct for the Gore/Gilet compensation system, and the nut being poorly glued is more evidence that it's not the original. It is surprising that the low E would be the farthest out, since it needs the most nut compensation so a straight nut should put it in roughly the right place. So most likely the nut slot is cut at the zero fret position as usual, and it originally had a shelf nut.

Here are some of the graphs that convinced me (and probably this builder) that nut compensation is objectively better. Standard saddle-only compensation versus nut compensation using a measurement rig and not too much effort. There's another graph with fine-tuning for a specific brand and gauge of strings that's basically a flat line with a little blip at the first fret, less than 1 cent error everywhere. It's really only that 4-5 cent difference between B string open and first few frets that bothers me, so I just use the recommended numbers from the book and tweak from there rather than trying for perfection. The low E actually has a larger error, but my ears don't catch it as strongly, though it's certainly nice to improve it too.

When you see stuff like this in the wild it is less likely that a not-widely-adopted compensation scheme is in use, and more likely that the universally understood and time-honoured practice of screwing up is at play.

There was a time when Martin put there bridges in the wrong place...
It's hard for me to believe that they would let those guitars out of there factory....
I'm not sure if this is true ,but I heard they had a "stick" that located the bridge and someone sanded the end of it and it got shorter.....

Anyway,I take great pains to have proper intonation,fretwork and set up on ALL my guitars.
If something is not right, it gets fixed.

Are you referring to a W.H.. by chance?

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So lots of comments and some pretty disappointing ones I will add. A customer of a small builder was screwed by a builder and guitar with a poorly located bridge that he paid thousands for period. This is not about someone's ideas about nut compensation and it's not something that any working in the trade repair luthier makes the decision on their own to dive in... and fix.

I posted this because I want people to do better. I don't want to have our industry harmed by people putting things out here that are substandard. I also am offended that rare and important materials were wasted on this one and the rest of the build quality was very poor too.

Dennis this thread is not about nut compensation and that is a remedy that the client does not want as clearly stated he's flipping the thing and for whomever mentioned that that's a shame, it is but I have no control over this.

Many of the comments here assume that a repair Luthier has the ability and right to dive in and make significant changes to the valuable personal property of others which nothing could be further from the case.

I was simply sharing an example of someone selling a defective guitar and what can result of which the story will continue and maybe someone else will post about this one when it leaves the next owner in tears.

Aaron I'm going to answer you so that no one assumes that it is WH. It's not, wrong coast...... Please though let's not go there as to who produced... this thing that serves no one to have Hesh here lose his valuable guitar collection because I was successfully sued... Don't think you would want your name involved if that happened either.

Dennis if you want to start a thread on nut compensation please do but that's not what I want to discuss here. Nor is it a solution to this person's issues nut compensation should not be necessary for conventionally tuned six string steel string guitars. I'll add if a guitar employing a builder's nut compensation ideas came into our shop and if the instrument had to have all the things unusual about how the builder spaced things annotated on the label that client would be going elsewhere for service. We would decline, we are too busy, we turn away 60% of what comes our way we are so busy others we know would as well. Guitar Center would maybe be an option... But my point is as Josh said nut compensation is highly dependent on who's strings, which strings you are compensating for and it has a home in the classical community but again is not necessary on a steel string unless frets and saddles are in the wrong locations and the nut slots are too high.

I'll also add that repair Luthiers are not "techs" and like Rick Turner and many others including TJ Thompson some of the very most experienced Luthiers in the world are also or have been repair Luthiers.

So I'm disappointed in the replies here and did not see a single reply where there was any empathy for a ripped off and royally screwed..... customer. Josh got it right that some one screwed up and that's why I posted this because that's indeed what happened. Someone screwed-up and produced a very high end instrument commanding top $$$ and they located the bridge .120" incorrectly..... The truss rod was inaccessible, frets loose, poor joinery, every dang pore is wide open and the high e is falling off the neck it's too close to the side of the neck.

Most importantly the instrument sounds dead and lifeless even with new strings but that's not my lane and I avoid the subjective in favor of providing real, measurable value to our clients.

Brad regarding Martin in the early 70's they did have a corrupted jig that located bridges on some 18's, 28's and 35's. Martin covered the repairs under their best in class warranty at no charge to the clients. We have repaired many of these and the Collins Saddle Mill was largely envisioned and created because of this opportunity for repair shops. These days most of them have been repaired and Martin will still cover the repair under warranty if it's the original owner.

The intonation inaccuracies were not noticed by many people who do the cowboy chord thing but other players who used the entire neck noticed it.

Huge difference here too Martin identified the problem and put in place a process to get it repaired and repaired often locally and at no charge to the client. That's as good as it gets in my view.

Am I defending Martin? Yes justifiably so I have never seen as customer centric an organization as Martin and my hat's off to them. They provide real value and in the very rare event when something goes wrong they are there for the client. We had a client receive warranty coverage on a neck reset 50 years out even though he never registered and did not have the receipt anymore. A photo of a toothless 9 year old smiling and holding the D-35 was enough for Martin to turn us on to do the repairs, substantial, neck reset repairs.

The guitar in question today always played out of tune and it is very noticeable too. The bridge did not get up and move on its own it came out of the shop this way....

So lastly from me nut compensation is no remedy for ****** workmanship and poor quality control. I believe that the builder had to know that this thing sucked, it's obvious but they let it go anyway. That's a shame and now it will be someone else's problem and that's a shame too.

Just as bad is using Brazilian and a nice Adi top on your first build. I saw that once and it had the issues you might expect.

Until he retired I got most of my wood from Walter Lipton of Euphonon. When I first called him he asked me how many guitars I had built. It was around ten..

He said “I can’t give you the good stuff yet”

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

Thanks for the clarification on my question, I had my reasons for asking, and am now happy that this isn't the case..
I do have a question as to why your client paid the builder for a sub-par instrument.. In this case, the buyer shouldn't have paid for and taken delivery of an instrument with such obvious issues.. Not to let the builder off the hook, of course, they shouldn't have sold an "instrument" with such an array of problems..

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My replies have all been empathetic to the customer, and the builder, and the future owners of this guitar, and to you, trying to help you understand why someone would intentionally glue the bridge in a different place than usual. I want to see it get fixed, not sold with a guilty conscience. You certainly have the right to refuse work on non-standard instruments, but I see no reason to send it back into the wild without informing the builder of the situation first.

Yep that was the ethic on this very forum years ago and why Colin got mad at me when I bursted a Master grade Adi top. That guitar still looks fantastic burst and all....

But back in the day Terry when you and I learned here NO ONE advocated crap work and the ethic that we heard over and over again when something did not turn out right was to do it over and make it right.

I'm glad that was how I learned it's served me very well with about 50+ clients a month for over 15 years now.

Learned today the owner of the guitar in question is against any further work, wants it out of his life, he paid around $10K for it and it's going on the market. We have no control over any of this.

Understand and I also understand what you had in mind by your question.

The guitar was not purchased from the builder. There were middle men and resellers and I think my client got it used because it's being passed around but don't quote me. It is not in great shape and people have tried to play it and that shows. It's being flipped, client is going to cut his losses and likely will be more careful in the future.

On another note I collect. There are resellers that I trust and have bought some pretty expensive Gutiars from sight unseen and I'm in the business and repair over 600 Gutiars a year and I trusted a few folks with my purchases too. So I can see how it happens. I do get special treatment at times when people Google us so maybe they are crossing the t's and dotting the I's for me knowing I will cry bloody murder and sue someone if I get ripped off. Maybe not and I'm just fortunate but everything I have ever bought sight unseen was described correctly except of one that stunk. Most of the smell is gone not but it was not pleasant at first....

The bridge was glued in the wrong place because the builder messed-up. What is so hard to understand about that?

There was no intent to compensate differently they simply measured incorrectly in a big way and then let it out the door.

Regarding refusing work it never got to that point the owner is so disappointed that he will not entertain paying to have it fixed and wants it out of his life and mind. We don't control any of this nor does anyone here so it does not matter what you, Dennis or I want, it's not up to us.

It never should have happened in the first place.

Because it seems absurd that someone could sell for $10K while making such large mistakes, whereas a clueless technician replacing the original nut is perfectly plausible. There's no way to know the builder's intent from its current state (still assuming that it's .120" closer to the neck than usual). But I guess all we can do now is cry about it.

I remember my one and only intonation complaint (so far).

Customer had it for several weeks, then politely pointed out that it was basically unplayable.

Naturally I was flabbergasted. How could I, master of ceremonies for so many years at a large facility having done not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands, make such a beige mistake? Impossible, there’s jigs for that!

Show me with a ruler I riposte.

And, sure enough, client was completely right. Saddle was in the wrong spot.

It took some head scratching, but I eventually realized that my foolproof bridge locating jig actually wasn’t foolproof, (or, I’m a better fool than I think).

I use a 1x6 rectangular bridge for speed and simplicity.

What I had done, was loaded my bridge in the jig backwards, with the pins ahead of the slot. My jig don’t care about that, it only cares about saddle location, that’s it’s only job.

So while in the jig backwards, the saddle location was correct, but the footprint weren’t.

I masked the footprint as usual and carried on, but, when I glued the bridge on in the correct orientation, the saddle slot location within the footprint was off by an amount I no longer remember. It was egregious but rerouteable without needing to pull the bridge).

There’s an infinite amount of ways to screw things up. What made me the most mad was that even with the intonation so far out, it still passed my intonation bench test (at that time, since adjusted), and flew without pause into the narry yonder. My client noticed what I should have, but didn’t.

I feel sad about Hesh’s client’s guitar. Somebody needs to fix it. It’s fixable. And since it’s been out there for quite some time, someone should have fixed it by now…

There is every way to know the original builder's intent and you are off the mark and continue to be so, Dennis.

The builder messed up and FYI Dennis builders mess up frequently but not to this degree usually and not on something billed as high-end as this one has been and its commanded price would suggest.

The bridge was glued .120" FURTHER from the nut NOT closer. The guitar was built prior to the books and ideas for nut compensation that you are citing were even published and the nut although no one can prove it appears original, is well made but the treble string is too close to the edge of the neck a common builder mistake. God knows no one could enjoy this thing by playing it long enough to wear out parts such as the nut anyway.

The guitar was built in 2005.

Thank You Ed you win the best post award and thanks for giving a dang too.

Mistakes happen, I make them we all do. The remedy is to fix them and also be looking for them. This is why to less experienced builders (not you Ed) I always recommend taking your stuff to an experienced professional and ask them what they think before you hang out a shingle. You may be producing a warranty nightmare that you do not want to let out of your shop.

I remember fondly being invited to a guy named David Collins' shop in Ann Arbor where we both lived but had never met. I had guitar number 5 with me and he took it out of the case, said a few complimentary things, sat down and strummed it, put it on his bench and got out the nut files.

I said nothing and had faith that he knew what he was doing. He did. As he wrenched on my guitar and I had a high pucker factor.... it was a test of my faith in someone I met on the OLF.

He cut my high nut slots and improved the playability 200% on the spot. I was both impressed and immediately asking him to show me how he does this.

It was as it should be a learning experience and not a judgmental situation where anyone had anything to hide or be offended or hurt over.

It was more important to me to learn to be a great Luthier than to get defensive over what I had produced and/or to act like I knew more than I did. Ego had not kicked in for me..... yet.

I was a stranger in a strange world back then and half of this remains true to this very day...

Anyway Ed thanks for the level set and caring about quality work, caring about the client, caring about your and the industry's reputation and now my customer too.

We all make mistakes but the tradition here on the OLF has always been to fix them, not to deny them...

Thank you for finally answering that! Yes, that confirms it. You're right, I'm wrong, it was a mistake by the builder. And even more tragic than I thought if this thing has been tormenting people for 18 years. Maybe the builder wouldn't have responded anyway then. Hard to believe nobody has contacted them about it in that much time.

We think it's changed hands at least several times and the client, our client did not get it from the maker. It's approaching a 20 year old guitar but still a good guitar with maintenance which includes neck resets if necessary should last longer than we humans do.

I suspect that being BRW and Adi and commanding a high price with a well known brand name discourages anyone from walking away from it until they do what it takes to find out what's wrong with it and then they know.

It's fixable (when it lands in hands willing to invest in it) but it will need a lot of work. Bridge removal, top refinish, I would refret it the fret work is terrible, new nut (usually part of a refret). I should have taken some pics of the pore unfilling, it's all shrunken back and they are all open, looks terrible and on a very nice set of BRW too.

Anyway you are welcome Dennis and as for me "finally" answering your question no one encouraged you or made you dive in with solutions (that weren't..) before you had a complete understanding of the issues. Rule one in the repair Luthier (tech...) world is to understand the problem, well before we touch a thing.

You went off on a nut.... compensation tangent all on your own, insulted repair people in the process calling us techs twice now even after this was suggested to you as insulting and suggests a holier than thou ego.

Techs, luthiers, etc. on the repair side like to fully understand things before we sling/spew solutions or we may find that we are off the mark and that leads people to believe that we don't know what we are talking about.