OGD... Old Guitar Day!

[McCreed]

Good work Simon. Looks like a pretty clean removal.
Keep posting your progress. Interesting stuff.

[Simon Barden]

I'm still in the process of doing this up. The back is now on, and I'm getting ready to respray a dark brown round the very edges and sides to cover up the repair work whilst keeping the top abd back covered up and original (though I will do an overall new clearcoat for more protection).

Here's the back and top with the re-glued bracing and everything generally sanded down and cleaned up. There's a small piece of ply glued across the crack in the top.




The first attempt at gluing the top on showed that the sides had twisted with the back off, and so the back and sided didn't line up well enough to glue. So it was a case of pulling the back off again. removing all the glue once it dried fully, and then clamping the sides to squeeze them back into place before the top went back on (I had to order a longer bar clamp to do this for the rear bout).



Once the back was on, I could then start fitting the spindle clamps. Once most were on, the back had enough downward force to hold the sides in place enough so I could remove the bar clamps and get more spindle clamps on to hold the last bits firmly together.



After that, I finally got round to removing the old tuners. This is when I found out that the guitar is post-war, as the tuner strips had a patent number on them indicating that they were a set of Klusons, designed in 1943 with the patent granted in 1944. So the guitar will be from 1945 at the earliest, but probably not a lot later. The sloppy nature of the tuners is part of their design where the riveted post/cog assembly is designed to be simply slotted into a pear-shaped post hole at an angle in order to considerably decrease production time. Previously the post hole was round and then the post had the cog screwed onto its end.

The string tension is supposed to pull the post tight enough so the vertical and horizontal cogs mesh well, but in reality that doesn't really happen and the tuners feel sloppy and inaccurate. It's not helped by the lack of any bushing to hold the posts more upright. This particular 3-on-a-strip design didn't last too long before being superseded, as by 1954, the first LP Jrs certainly used a different 3-on-a-strip design of Klusons with enclosed gears.

[JohnH]

Great work Simon, and nice find. I love those regal parlour guitars

[jugglindan]

Beautiful. A parlor guitar with a wide nut like this would be fantastic for fingerpicking.

[Andy40]

Nice work Simon, enjoyed the thread