Imagine showing up to rehearsal and opening your case to this!
This 1968 Gibson SG recently came into my shop for a setup and had obviously been through a bad headstock break. The repair is pretty messy with seven or so dowels and two brass screws. What a shame. All that extra reinforcement is completely unnecessary as the glue joint is stronger than the wood. I set it up, cleaned up the pots and switch contacts, and sent it out the door...
Only to have it come back couple weeks later looking like this. Courtesy of Delta Airlines and a beat up old guitar case that buckled when the baggage handlers were tossing it around like my mail carrier tosses my Stewmac deliveries.
First I need to pick off all of the wood fibers that are preventing the joint from fitting tightly. Once I have a snug fit I can glue it up. Due to the nature of the break the headstock needs to be pulled into the neck towards the body so I rigged up some string through the tuner holes and stretched it around the strap button on the neck heel. This combined with the clamping pressure will yield a nice tight glue joint. For the clamping cauls I used two pieces of polycarbonate sheet on the back to conform to the curve and a wood block on the front, both with some teflon sheet between to prevent the cauls from sticking to the glue squeeze-out.
Here's what it looks like after removing the clamp. I managed to clean up most of the glue squeeze-out before clamping so it's pretty clean.
Next I plugged the holes with dowels and filled in the cracks with super glue then sanded them smooth.
I tested the cherry red dye on a piece of Honduras Mahogany before rubbing it into the exposed wood.
I have a little bit more work to do with the super glue before spraying the lacquer and I figured since I'd be spraying over the inlays I would fill the finish that has chipped off of them.
Cosmetic restoration is a lot of work and overall this was a satisfying job and the customers reaction was great. Would I do anything different? Absolutely. I would like to have experimented with using hide glue as filler for the front or tried the black super glue I forgot I had. If I had more time I would like to have doweled and re-drilled the tuner holes because whoever drilled them to fit the modern tuners did a complete hack job.