Broken Guitar Neck on a Gretsch White
Falcon
Fixing a broken guitar neck with a long trailing break is not a hard task,
but when the break is clean, there needs to be some specialized work, or
else it will not withstand the string tension. This break had very little
area left to connect anything to, leading us to come up with a very solid
solutionOur specialty is surgically repairing broken guitar necks and
broken guitar headstocks when there is not much area to be reconnected. This
is where we kick butt and other shops end up telling you to toss it, or
leave you with a literal screw job holding your parts together.
Take a look at this broken headstock on a reissue Gretsch (not spelled
Gretch) White Falcon. |
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| There she sits, as it came in. Ouch! |
A closer look at the remaining piece of the
fracture we had to work with |
A good look at the back. There was about 1.5
inches of break area to attach. |
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| The truss rod nut was exposed from the back. |
Here we melted wax and protected the truss rod
nut, the threads, as well as stopped any glue from getting into the truss
rod channel. Later with modest hear, the wax will easily fall out |
We setup a clamp system to hold the neck and
headstock together and get us something to start from. |
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| Here is the front of the headstock after being
first glued. At this point, the surface area of the joint alone would not
have enough strength to withstand the string pull. |
A look at the back of the joint after initial
gluing. |
To make the joint stringer, we decided to
drill two 1/4 inch round channels. one on each side of the truss rod.
We would then insert two 1/4 inch maple dowels in these channels to add
strength. |
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| Here you can see the rods after they have been
inserted |
The back of the neck, after the rods were
inserted. As you can see, one of the rods actually came out of the back of
the neck, about 1" past the break. |
No problem! After sanding, filling, and
sealing the area, the break is starting to disappear. |
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| Here's the headstock, after sanding and
filling. We strung the guitar and subjected it to quite a few stress
tests, that I'm sure it did not appreciate. |
Before we spray the white, we needed to repair
the missing binding. The White Falcon has a gold glitter binding, and it
was not available. |
Actually, the binding is silver glitter, with
a yellow transparent top coat. We went through about 10 different methods
trying to match this, and were finally successful. If you contact us, we
will tell you! |
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Here we are after our first few coats of white on the back |
And here is the front after a few coats of white. Note that the decal area
has remained intact, and is masked off. |
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Completed, Put Together..
Looks Good, |
