10 Aug 2015 - Kim Has A Weird Neck

Well it looks like I'm not very good at updating my blog daily. I'm starting a couple of new projects now, though, so it's a good time to pick this back up. My new goal is going to be posting at least once a week, even if it's just pictures of what I've been working on. I'd like to post more often than that, but I'll start with once a week.

As for the new projects, the first is a guitar that I'm working on for a friend named Kim. Her 80s or 90s Korean-made Kay guitar had become unplayable because the neck had started to separate from the body. I told her that I'd fix up the neck, reset it if the angle wasn't quite right, and maybe even do the whole conversion process like we do on the older Kay and Harmony guitars. Here it is minus the strings:

Today I started by taking the neck off. Most Kay guitars (and all of the older guitars that we do the conversion process on) have dovetail neck joints like this (this is not Kim's guitar):

In the old Harmony pictured here, the dovetail tenon on the neck heel fits into the mortise (slot) in the neck block on the body of the guitar.

However, I immediately started to doubt that Kim's guitar had a dovetail joint when I first felt around inside the instrument. The neck block seemed too small, and there was another longitudinal block running under the top of the guitar almost to the sound hole.

I proceeded cautiously, drilling into where I thought a joint would be if there was a straight tenon. I steamed out the holes in hopes of loosening whatever glue was holding things together. I did steam out some glue but not quite in the way that I had suspected. When I started wiggling the neck a little, I noticed that there were some dowels running from the neck heel into the neck block. Two of them were right where I had been steaming the glue out on either side of the trussrod. The steam had loosened the glue around them, and they were coming out of the neck pretty easily. Two more dowels were positioned directly below the trussrod, one near the middle of the heel and one near the bottom. I ended up having to saw through those two. Enough of the words, here's what it looks like:

This is an unusual neck joint, but I'll be able to turn it into a more conventional bolt-on neck by drilling out the two sawed dowels and replacing them with bolts.

That's it for today. I'll keep posting as I make progress.