Manchester Guitar Tech
When doing a general setup and fettle of this 70s Les Paul copy, I noticed that a couple of the inlays were standing proud of the fretboard. This is a common problem with these old guitars – the celluloid shrinks, warps and comes unstuck. You can see that they were never a good fit and …
This Japanese Fender Precision Bass has been the mainstay of the bassist from The Australian Pink Floyd Show for about ten years. Due to it being used for the same songs show after show, a couple of major grooves were worn in frets two and three. I therefore performed a partial refret, carefully removing the …
This Australian-built Maton Supreme 777 is getting on for 50 years old and has seen some action! It came to me needing a refret, a new nut and a general fettle. The Bigsby vibrato was in a sorry state and needed rebuilding with a new arm and spring. The pickups had been cut off at some …
A couple of tours ago I did some work on Jared Followill’s basses, and today the Kings of Leon brought me a couple more to work on before tonight’s gig at the Lancashire County Cricket Ground. I shielded both bases with copper foil and rewired them using CTS pots, Teflon coated wire and a solid copper …
A regular customer of mine recently bought a 2006 Les Paul and brought it to me for a setup. As soon as I straightened the neck, which had been somewhat bowed, I realised that the 1st string was buzzing against the first fret as the nut had been cut too low. I suspect that the relief …
A customer brought me his 2011 PRS Special complaining that notes did not ring out and saying that he thought that the frets were uneven. It’s quite unusual for a brand new PRS to have fret problems so I took a look and sure enough, several frets were low around the 12th fret. You can …
This beautiful 1989 Gibson L4 CES was brought in with a bad electrical buzz. I traced the buzz to a disconnected bridge earth wire which I reconnected. I noticed however that at some point early in its life the guitar had been rewired with different pots. The pots have solid shafts and whoever did the work …
I was brought a Fender Japan 70s reissue Telecaster with a broken truss rod for repair. The threaded part truss rod had broken at the headstock. I extracted the truss rod from the heel of the guitar and found that there was still over 1cm of thread left on the end. My solution therefore was simply …
I have just refretted this maple board Telecaster. At the request of the customer I left the fretboard lacquer intact as it was virtually undamaged. I had hoped to get away without changing the nut but the 1st string slot was too low. The old nut tapped out easily enough and I cleaned up the …
Note: In this post I refer to “left-handed” and “lefty”. This refers to a guitar which is strung, looking at the guitar face on, with the 1st string on the left and the 6th string on the right. A customer asked me to convert their brand new Epiphone acoustic to left handed. It seems that …