Official Luthiers Forum!

So I'm just getting my feet wet and picked up a $15 guitar that came out of a barn. Kind of a neat old piece; a Jackson-Guldan from the 1960's. Has an "adjust-o-matic neck" that adjusts via a screw accessible from the soundhole. The neck fits on a bit crooked, and upon closer inspection the wood on the body where it meets the neck is damaged causing the neck to fit poorly.

So basically I'm wondering the best way to go about this. Should I cut a chunk out and put new wood in? Should I use some type of a filler? I've never done any precision projects with wood, so please keep that in mind. Also, the guitar is basically worth it's weight in wood. Just looking to tinker with it and hopefully come out with a decent player. The rest of it is in surprisingly good playing condition and has a nice "aged" look to it that I assume can only come from a barn.





Thanks.

Welcome to the forum Mr. Failacy,

Routing out the damaged wood and gluing in a replacement piece is the correct way to repair this guitar. If you haven't aquired the skill level to do a competent repair, perhaps visiting a Luthier (not a Guitar Center tech) is in order. It shouldn't be a costly repair by any means.
Filling with something like Minwax High Performance Wood Filler could certainly do the trick in the short term, how short that term may be is the problem.
Could you post more pictures showing the neck and connecting hardware? I've never seen one of these apart (or in person for that matter) and am interested in how it works.

Steve

Here are a few more pictures. I actually picked up another one of these badboys recently.


There is a bolt that goes through the L-bracket and hits the metal plate you can see inside the guitar. On the body where the neck meets the guitar there is a bolt sticking out that has some play in it. This hold the neck down but still allows the bolt in the bracket to adjust the angle of the neck.


I'm not going to bring it to a Luthier as the whole point of me buying these is to try to do some work myself. I hope that they end up having good action and a nice feel, but if all fails I'll probably just make them into floorlamps.

So what would my process be for putting in the new wood? A precise cut and some woodglue? Put ridges in the pieces to make them fit, as you often see on shelves? Duct tape?

A precise cut and original Titebond wood glue will be best.
You'll need a router and a pattern cutting bit. Here's a picture of the bit you'll need.


Rout out the bad wood removing only about a 1/16" per cut. Once you have a nice clean surface, you can make a piece to replace the missing wood. Looks like Maple so you might as well replace it with the same. Since the side wood is routed to fit the profile of the neck, you'll have to stop the rout before you cut thru the side wood. You'll need a sharp chisel to clean up the radiused corners left by the router bit or you can radius the corners of the replacement piece to fit.

Steve

Thanks Steve, that's what I was looking for!