Guitar Fails

[tubecrunch]

Re: Guitar Fails

Ill go low tech. The first time I changed my own strings it took me an hour. It's been down hill ever since.

 

[ehdwuld]

Re: Guitar Fails

once tuned an acoustic one octave too high
during the night I heard the loud pop as the bridge popped off the soundboard

when I got my first Floyd Rose style guitar
I immediately broke the LOW E string
I dont know exactly what I did but it was dramatic when it gave

my buddy wound the LOW E clockwise over the tuner and pulled the nut slap out of the slot

 

[nightfall]

Re: Guitar Fails

once tuned an acoustic one octave too high
during the night I heard the loud pop as the bridge popped off the soundboard

when I got my first Floyd Rose style guitar
I immediately broke the LOW E string
I dont know exactly what I did but it was dramatic when it gave

my buddy wound the LOW E clockwise over the tuner and pulled the nut slap out of the slot

First time I changed my Floyd I nearly cut my middle finger to the bone with my high e string when it snapped

 

[gottalovethe80s]

Re: Guitar Fails

once tuned an acoustic one octave too high
during the night I heard the loud pop as the bridge popped off the soundboard

when I got my first Floyd Rose style guitar
I immediately broke the LOW E string
I dont know exactly what I did but it was dramatic when it gave

my buddy wound the LOW E clockwise over the tuner and pulled the nut slap out of the slot

I broke the low e string on my first floydrose guitar too, I desperately tried to salvage it but that didn't work, made for a pretty cool picture though

 

[LogicallyInsane]

Re: Guitar Fails

My stepdad hates changing strings, so he's always getting me to do it.. well I had just gotten this new fancy winder (up to this point I had always tuned by fingers).. so anyways. I get the first 3 strings on and get to the "D" string.. push it thru the tuner hole and get a phone call.. I answer the phone and try to multitask.. start winding like crazy and POP... the string broke at the bridge and sliced the hell outta my hand that just happened to be sittin in that general area.. Boy that wasn't fun! .. got blood all over his new guitar... he was pissed lmao ... the good news is.. he changes his own strings now..

Also bought a push/pull pot a few months ago.. I'm still a mediocre solderer, so I wound up dripping solder down into one of the holes in the side of the casing.. locked it up! Won't push pull or turn.. lol

Edit: also gotta ask.. am I the only one that gets a finger pricked by one of the smaller strings each time you change em? .. I swear I'm liable to get tetanus by the time its all said and done.. lol

 

[Drunken Bowling]

Re: Guitar Fails

I ripped the bridge pickup out of the first electric I owned. Just ripped it out without knowing that it needed to be unsoldered. :dunce:

 

[Oinkus]

Re: Guitar Fails

Putting a Floyd into my 88 HM Strat a few years ago and we took the inserts/posts of the Kahler out routed and reset. Well it turns out that those are oddball guitars , they actually have a 25" scale , so the bridge was 1/2" out of place ? Never in our wildest dreams did we think we needed to measure it ? Still freaks me out sometimes.

 

[VanDerchuck]

Re: Guitar Fails

I set a Dio shirt on fire once while installing a SuperDistortion. Last Dimarzio pickup I ever bought.

 

[Vengeance]

Re: Guitar Fails

My most recent flub would have to be stretching behind my amp to plug in my cab and knocked my mini mass of my cab . Corner of it landed straight up on my Kramer Condor and had takin a HUGE chunk out of the face of the guitar. Easy the size of a quarter.

It had been maybe built a week with all NOS parts. A little part of me died inside that night, guitar has since been parted out.

 

[DreX]

Re: Guitar Fails

I've done lots of things that had caused a fair amount of financial damage in a matter of moments; pulled coil tape away and ripped the coil wires, tried to open an SD little '59 with the modern style plastic housing and ripped the thing apart, severed the coil lead wire on an SSL-4 when the screw driver slipped off the screw and down beside the eyelet where the wire passed over the flat work (that's a stupid design btw). I somehow polished the color off of a couple Fenders by using a drill polish attachment, leaving what looks like a clear coat in it's place. I don't have the issue after buying an orbital polisher though. There's more, but it gets increasingly less interesting. One little nic or a moment of carelessness can render hours of body work useless, because you'd often can't patch the mistake without showing some evidence of the repair.

 

[Farkus]

Re: Guitar Fails

I burned my mom's carpet with a soldering iron when I was 15. Well, more like melted than burned.

 

[BloodRose]

Re: Guitar Fails

Great thread idea! helps me feel alil better.. " And bad mistakes.... Ive made a few..." My worst was the first time I changed tuning keys on a guitar. I replaced cheap squier keys with some Sperzels. I had to drill out the holes and didnt work myself up to size. Starting on the low e string, I shoved the drill bit in and busted the whole back corner off the headstock.. Luckily I was able to fix it, but....

Thank God I learned my lesson on a cheap guitar instead of busting a gibson or something

 

[Agileguy_101]

Re: Guitar Fails

Every time I play it's a guitar fail.

 

[soulforger]

Re: Guitar Fails

I actually threw away an Aria II Les Paul Custom clone with a set neck and everything.

THREW IT AWAY.

Back in the '80s, I threw away a Maestro Echoplex...before the internet finding tapes for these was next to impossible, oh how I wish I hadn't done that!!!

 

[Artie]

Re: Guitar Fails

once tuned an acoustic one octave too high
during the night I heard the loud pop as the bridge popped off the soundboard

I did something similar once. I was tuning a friends bass. I wasn't very familiar with bass tuning. I went online and found someone who had bass guitar tuning samples, which I downloaded. I already had the strings on the guitar according to size. No problem yet. I then loaded the sample into my favorite music player, and started tuning. The E string was getting super tight. Then I realized, the music player had listed the notes in alphabetical order. I was trying to tune the E to A. :headache:


But my worst was when I installed a new Duncan pickup set into my own Strat. I did an SSL-5 in the bridge. There was one wire stuck between the pickguard and body, by the bridge. Of all the tools I could have grabbed to push it back under . . . I grabbed an X-Acto knife. It slipped and I jabbed the point right into the coils. Never got to hear that pup. :banghead:

 

[Chris of Arabia]

Re: Guitar Fails

It occurs to me that I have more...

 

[formula73]

Re: Guitar Fails

I've destroyed countless pots by leaving the iron on them too long when trying to solder the case ground. I finally learned my lesson and bought a 230w just for that particular task. It gets so hot so fast the rest of the case doesn't even have time to heat up before the solder's already cooled off.

 

[Little Pigbacon]

Re: Guitar Fails

It used to offend my aesthetic sensibilities that the fretboard on my black RG270DX was this nice brown, natural rosewood color.

View attachment 53215

This guitar was not supposed to be natural at all. It had EMGs by then -- 81, SA, 89R. There was one color acceptable here, and that was shiny black. So I ordered a bottle of the black ebony dye from Stew-Mac, and however it was I chose to apply it… was not entirely correct. Even after the dye should have dried completely, it was still coming off on my fingers, the strings, the frets… I'd also managed to stain the sharktooth inlays to the point where they looked like stormclouds, which was cool but not what I intended.

I ended up doing a layer of poly overtop of all the spaces between frets, just to seal it and keep it in place. Normally I would be appalled at the thought of such a weird and unnatural measure, but I decided that's exactly the sort of thing that belongs on a guitar like this.

View attachment 53216

After some years of playing, the poly is starting to wear through in spots and expose the dyed rosewood to wear, which in turn is now starting to show some of its natural wood tones again. This, too, is something I have decided is cool. It probably says something about me as a DIY person that I tend to prefer what happens by accident over what I do on purpose.

View attachment 53217

 

[Kam]

Re: Guitar Fails

I once soldered a pickup into a guitar three times (including one ****-it-I'll-tear-everything-out-and-start-from-scratch attempt) and nearly threw the whole damn thing out the window in frustration when I couldn't get a single freaking sound out of it.

Then I remembered to plug it into the amp.

 

[Chris of Arabia]

Re: Guitar Fails

So, you know the Tele, the blue Tele? Much loved of polls and drooling guitarists alike. Well, it has a secret...

Once upon a time, it was not the fine specimen you see here from time to time. No, it was a bunch of piece parts; very nice piece parts, but parts nonetheless. One of those parts had an omission. Nothing too serious one might think, but pretty fundamental when it come to assembling a functioning instrument. The nature of this omission? Holes... Specifically, the holes needed to thread the pickup cables through. It would seem that someone at Warmoth had forgotten to do their little bit, and that meant it arrived some 10,000 miles away with me, not exactly as it should be. Still, what's a couple of holes between friends....

I talked to Warmoth, they we're happy enough to take it back, but I wanted to get it put together; shipping it back would take weeks. So I elected to sort it myself, after all, it can't be that hard, can it? They told me I needed a long 1/4" bit to give me the length I needed to reach though the body. After weeks of searching, I finally found a suitable bit on the Internet and got it shipped to a guy I knew was travelling to Riyadh soon. The bit was longer than I ideally wanted at around 12" long, but better that than too short. Anyway, several weeks after the parts arriving, I can get cracking with assembling things.

The first hole goes just below the surface of the body from the neck joint, through the neck pickup cavity, and then on down to the bridge pup route. Despite the length of the bit and cordless drill combined, all is well; a perfectly drilled hole to take the cable where it's needed. On to the second hole then - an angled hole from the bridge route and into the control cavity. The angle is a little trickier, as I need to clear the back edge of the bridge pup route, hit exactly the right spot at its opposite side, and come out cleanly in the control cavity. So off I start, drill high, feeling miles from the piece due to the length of this damned bit - imagine trying to unlock a front door with a key tied to the end of a fishing rod if you will. All seems well. The side of the bit isn't touching the front of the body, the drill is going through seemingly cleanly, until all of a sudden I feel a slight shift in the body, it feels like it's lifting. Uh oh! What gives? With a sense of trepidation I back the drill out, turn the body over to see the tell tale signs of the finish lifted just beyond where I'd drilled only seconds earlier. Bugger! One nice neat oval shaped perforation had appeared in the back of that beautiful body. Not in the scheme of things a significant problem from a functional perspective, not even visible under normal conditions, but bloody irritating all the same.

So there you have, that vision of loveliness has a flaw, and I can blame no one but myself. Oh well...