Official Luthiers Forum!

I'm always amazed at what some folks will to to pull off a fix on their guitar. I've seen many unorthodox repairs like this headstock repair that work for years. The funny thing is that it would actually have been a lot easier to fix that headstock the proper way then to craft a metal base out and screw it in! And that seems to be a case for a lot of these 'repairs.'

Having said that there really is no explanation for why your guitar would have a 12-string effect to it. The only thing I can think of in hind sight was that if the peg holes were too narrow then I guess perhaps the ball end of the strings may not have been mounted to the underside of the bridge plate and hence could have been free floating and rattling like a tambourine inside the sound box. I have no idea.

Note: this is my first post to this forum, so I'm an admitted newby who can be safely ignored.

I for one am glad you did what you did. You learned a lot from it. If your first attempt at a repair was less then perfect, so be it. Your next one will be better. You may even get up the courage to take that plate off and do a proper repair on the peg-head (my recommendation would be epoxy). If it doesn't work, you can always put the plate back, and no harm done. This is the way we learn, one mistake at a time. There's an old aviation saying that goes "Good judgment is the product of experience. Experience is the product of bad judgment." And as Bill Cumpiano wrote, we all approach mastery one mistake at a time, and achieve it when we have made all the mistakes that there are to make, and can see them coming and prevent them before they happen.

As somebody else pointed out, it was a cheap guitar to begin with, and therefore an excellent test bed for all sorts of experiments and learning opportunities. Proceed on it with caution and respect, but without fear. If al goes well, you'll still have a playable instrument, and will have acquired a wealth of knowledge about how a guitar is built than any amount of reading.

And next time, it might be worthwhile to ask around before you attempt any repair. That way, you can take advantage of all the mistakes that other people ( myself foremost among them) have made in similar situations.