Recent content by octavedoctor

I was chatting to one of my customers - who is also a good friend - and I'd probably bored him rigid going on about some technical thing or other and he said to me "you know, you should teach this stuff. There's nobody out there teaching the stuff that you know" "Yes there is" I said, "it's...

A Taylor headstock, snapped across the grain like a carrot. Normal g clamps won't close the joint properly as pressure needs to be applied in a direction perpendicular to the line of the break, which, in this case, means at a shallow angle almost parallel to the headstock. The solution? A...

i haven't been around for a while. Here's why... http://www.jonese.f2s.com/

...one of these muthas ever comes my way! Starting top to bottom you have 12 string 6 string with locking trem 5 String Bass 4 String bass 7 string with locking trem 6 string hardtail Why?

This is fantastic. professor string Not wishing to sound arrogant but I reckon between this forum and the prof we ought to be able to provide you with the answers to most of your technical problems, it seems to me.

As anyone who has followed my posts here knows, I have a huge problem with Gibsons. At times it seems to me that there is no-one in control of the company who understands even some basic stuff about guitar making. I was struggling the other day with the usual problem of trying to get the...

Just made this for a client. Just showing off really... :cool2: That lovely warm coppery colour is the real deal; no lighting effects or photoshop.

I was playing around with my new PDA on the train in a vain effort to justify the purchase of another gadget that I don't need and a came up with this little spreadsheet. It's purpose is to calculate the true scale length of a guitar based on an accurate measurement of the positions of two known...

Been working on a 40th (?) Anniversary strat neck with a fault in the skunk stripe. Check this out: The skunk stripe at the point where the hole is was little more than a veneer concealing a pocket of air between the fillet and the truss rod. The crazing is reticulation caused by expansion...

I'm seeing a lot of this on Gibsons lately. There's always been the odd one but now it seems to be on all of them. The bridge seems to be about a quarter inch too far forward so you have to crank the saddles all the way back to get the intonation tempered. Sometimes you can't get it right on...

Does anyone have access to a circuitry schematic for a Parker P-38 with the Powerbridge and onboard powerchip? I've got this POS on my bench and I keep buying powerchips and they keep turning up faulty... I just need to know if it's something I'm doing wrong before I sound off at the...

It's an "Airline" from the sixties I believe. They were primarily a "catalogue" guitar, sold I believe through Sears - Roebuck.

I had to work on a mandoline for a friend who'd had some work done by another "luthier" recently. As i've written an extensive blog on it I thought i'd just post it here as a link to my MySpace blog. I think the responsible thing to do is to issue a warning to those who have little tolerance...

Considering that i first advocated the idea of stainlesss steel fretwire about 15 years ago (to universal apathy, i might add) it's taken me a while to get around to trying it out. It took a customer to specifically request it as a remedy for his nickel contact dermatitis. I'm now thinking of...

In response to some questions posed by a member in another thread, I thought I would post this series of images showing how to do a "professional" cable splice. In fact, there is no such thing as a real professional would replace the whole cable, but I'm sure you understand my meaning. If you...