Superfast

So much has happened in the last 24 hours. Got home from work and finished dinner by about 6:30. At 6:45, I had everything layed out to start on the truss rod repair. I'm leaving town friday morning for the Pitchfork festival in Chicago, so I pretty much only had wednesday night to fiddle with this till I get back. I figured if I got the fret board off, I'd be happy. Well...shortly before 8:00PM I had:

1) The fret board off
2) The strip of wood holding the truss rod in...out
3) The truss rod removed, straightened and re-threaded
4) The various bits and pieces cleaned up and ready for reassembly

I was astounded! It only took 30 minutes to actually completely remove the fret board. Much, much easier than I anticipated.

I decided, since I did not have the proper tools to make the new truss rod fit (I was going to hit a friend up for that), that I would see what I could do with the old one. Well, using the die, a shitty old vice in the garage, a hammer and some ingenuity I was able to get the old one usable, so I just stuck with it. All I needed in the end was the washer and brass nut.

A quick run to Lowes before they closed produced five c-clamps, a strip of wood for distributing the clamping force, some sandpaper, a glue brush and a few other small odds and ends. I then proceeded to get it all back together.

Now, my original intention was to use the pellet style of hide glue to reassemble all this....but I did not have any, nor could I get any locally last night. I did have a bottle of the liquid hide glue that I got from Stew Mac, and after some research and consideration, I decided it was perfectly fine to use in this application. At least I hope so. It's reversible, if not...

I got the truss rod reinstalled, and then glued in the wood retaining strip, clamped it up and let it sit for about 45 minutes. That's how long the glue bottle said was needed for initial set-up. While waiting for that, I cleaned up the fretboard mating surface and did a few other things to ready for the process of regluing the fretboard down.

I probably started the whole process about 9PM...maybe 9:30PM. I wasn't done till around 11PM. It took a long while to get the glue spread, get the fretboard down, clamped and positioned exactly where I wanted it. Then there was the clean-up of the glue that had squeezed out. It was a messy deal and I found myself running to the sink many times to wash glue off my hands. After much fiddling, I wa shappy with the fretboard placememtn and clamping, so I set the guitar aside, cleaned up and played guitar for a bit before I hit the sack.

It's a good thing I had and used some wax paper to protect the clamping cauls and neck wood while I was gluing up the fretboard. I knew I needn't worry about inadvertently gluing anything together that shouldn't have been.

Sadly, all the original position markers, both neck edge and fretboard. were ruined in the process of steaming/heating the board off. I shall need to replace them and wonder what I could have done differently that would have prevented that.

Here's a link to the album of the process:

Gretsch Truss Rod Repair