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Well.. The box is closed and the top and back are routed even... Looks like a guitar... Ready for binding...

but then.. The dilemma.... What to bind it with? I hadn't really thought this build this far ahead....

Then it struck me....... What else but Birch?
With a wink and a nod to the millions of cheap Birch guitars that Harmony put out over the years.... Nothing but Birch will do.... now where to find some birch?

Here's a pic next to my J45 build for reference...


and side shot


Thanks

About 7/16 wide, about .550 high.. some may be a bit higher.

Glenn

The bindings went in.. 2nd successful run with the 3M #233 - that stuff works very well... I won't be going back to the old blue tape anytime soon...

I think the bindings are either birch or maple... Not sure which one... I found some scrap in the stack and resawed it into bindings - so that's what it has... The white wood looks nice against the dark mahogany.... but it won't be as striking under the varnish...


and the first wash coat of varnish is going on the body... I am brushing Behlen's Rock Hard tabletop varnish...




Next up will be the neck - new trussrod and new fretboard... but the finishing is when things bog down horribly for me... Getting the finish on and looking right takes me forever. It's one of those things that I think I would be happy to pay someone else to do if it didn't cost a fortune.... I am not really selling these - so the costs do count...

So anyway... Do I go "Correct" and leave the fretboard flat - or put a little radius in it? I am leaning towards a 20" radius... but I am not all the way sold....

Thanks

WRT radius, here are my thoughts after playing old Oscar Schmidt guitars for years. If you play bottleneck guitar - definitely leave flat. Makes a big difference in getting that tone, and "fretting" all 6 strings with the bottle - IMO. If you don't play bottleneck, I would put a radius. I am building my take on these guitars, and for this one, building for "standard" playing, so i am putting a radius. I plan to build 2 more after this (6 and 12 string), both long scale (26.5", which the Grand concerts had), and flat radius.

Glenn

A friday teaser...

So, I finally decided - the neck got a 20" radius.. It's easy to set up the strings for flat action/slide or slightly curved for normal playing - but it's a lot more painful to radius a fretboard after it's already fretted...

Neck is excavated and truss rod is fitted. Fretboard is rough tapered slightly oversize


Fretboard glued on the neck


Once everything is trued up, I carefully level the neck so that the surface is very even for the frets. This reduces issues with levelling and crowning. You can see the frets are in now.


Neck setting basically finished - time to see what this guitar looks like... I need to make a nut and bridge, but I will play it this weekend.


I will go back and fix up some little boo boos here and there... so it's not all the way finished, but it feels real close....

Unfortunately, I know about 4 chords... so I gotta go find a ringer to play it for me to really see what she sounds like...

Thanks

Great work.
So the only original part left is the neck?
Pretty absurd and pretty cool at the same time.

Here we go.
Still plenty of odds and ends left to do... But I played it this weekend.

I knocked up a bridge out of some scrap cherry. The nut is a scrap from a saddle blank.
I hate the tuners - those gritty hard to turn pieces of junk need to go....

The thumbnails are sideways - but the pictures load right.... So click the links.

John, the bracing looked good. You triangulated it I gather. How do you like the short scale?

I understand your passion, as you are essentially building a whole new guitar!

I did a "restomod" to this 1927 Supertone Parlor model 489 "The Entertainer". It was made by harmony in Chicago, not by Kay, and they had other versions of the same guitar, with different stenciled artwork on them; A Hawaiian motif, one with a cowboy... It sold for a mere $17 from Sears Roebuck & Co. back then, but the cheaper ones were ~$6 to $8, and the top of the line ~$24.

It is an all solid mahogany body and neck, with real mahogany and maple rope binding and rosette. The "ebonized" soft maple fingerboard was hanging on by the nut of the same ebonized maple, everything was crooked and never was aligned right, some of the fret position markers "real Bakelite inlays" were between the wrong frets and one (or the other) book matched sides was flipped head to tail...

I rebuilt the neck with a ~1/16" layer of hard maple between the fingerboard and neck back for reinforcement, as it was short enough to get away without a truss rod. I reset the neck and had to add wood, because the dovetail never did make contact anywhere (nothin' but glue). I added inlays (in the right spots) of brass, maple and mahogany with a polyurethane finish for wear protection over black dye, and leveled and crowned the brass frets. I did some minor re-gluing of sides and bracing where they were coming apart. I made a new compensated ebony bridge with individual brass saddles of my own design, re-using the angle from the headstock, with inlays to match the ones I put in the fingerboard, and finished the whole thing in TruOil. I rebuilt the tail piece to accept ball end strings (they used loops back then), sanded the nickel plating down to the brass to match the brass tuners, and bolted it to the top to add string angle to the bridge, and that actually increased the volume quite noticeably. I made a brass nut, serviced the tuners, re-carved the peg head slots and a few other minor details.

The true oil finish showed every fingerprint, and needed around a month to cure completely, so I gave the owner some homework: Wait a month and polish with burlap. I did way more than the owner had expected and payed for, but I was compelled, and wrote off the difference as "Portfolio work".

It sounds, plays and looks great, and the owner is more than happy, as she was told by Guitar Center (who crowned one of their salesmen: guitar tech) "It can not be repaired" and proceeded to try and sell her a new guitar... When it was done, she brought it back there and showed it to them! She said they were all drop jawed.

_________________
If what you see is what you get, then Stevie Wonder ain't got nothin'!

That's an interesting solution with a tailpiece that I honestly never thought of. Interesting.
That is a beautiful guitar.
It's pretty amazing how these little cheap junk boxes sound and play pretty darned good once they are all sorted out. It's like there is a real guitar hiding under all the poor workmanship and horrible setup.... You just have to dig it out.

Thanks

A lot of digging too, imagine how many of these never made it because few are as nuts as us to get out the shovel, pull up our sleeves, and commence the rescue!

The one you did may not even be a parlor, but just a small body. It just looks so much wider than anything called a parlor I have seen. On the other hand I did not pop into this world until the 60's. Either way: Whats in a name? Now it can be enjoyed again. You mentioned you "don't do this to sell them", it looks sell-able to me, and if you keep restoring guitars and never sell them you end up a hoarder, and will one day have to climb over them to get around the house! In your case you can even put your own label inside, since you just fell shy of making the whole thing.

_________________
If what you see is what you get, then Stevie Wonder ain't got nothin'!

Here it is finished up

Finish is all polished out shiny
New Tusq nut
Jatoba/Brazilian Cherry bridge.
New brace inside the box to cut the top deflection by about half.











Thanks for looking.

Just in case anyone here wants to try build one of these.... Here's a pic of the pattern.