Can it be repaired?

Picked up my 10mm bit at Rockler locally. Finally got around today to doing some work on the guitar.

I started by carefully measuring the centerpoint of the tuners, and marking where they would need to be. Measure twice, cut once!



I attached a bit of scrap wood to the front of the headstock to prevent any tear-outs when I drilled. I then clamped a little fence on my drill press so I could line things up.



I actually wound up drilling through the back of the headstock, because I was worried most about tear-outs on the front face. So here's what I wound up with. Nice, clean, even holes:



Here's the front.



SO I'm not terribly confident at this point. Instead of investing a lot of time and materials in the finish, I'd like to know ahead of time if this thing, once it's tuned to pitch, is going to explode on me. Yeah, yeah, I've heard all the woodworker assurances that a glued joint is stronger than the wood itself. Well, let's just see.



The tuners go in. Hey, look at that, my holes lined up nicely!



The strings go on. In this shot, I had installed the strings, but not tuned them up to pitch yet. I'm getting a little nervous, especially when I see the string package and look at the string tensions:



Yeah, that's 85 pounds I'm going to hang off this headstock.

So I tuned each string up to pitch. The low E and A strings were a no-brainer, since they attach before the glue joint. The D string came up to pitch nicely, followed by the G, and the B. Last but not least, the high E string came up to pitch, and the headstock stayed intact!

Mind you, I wore safety goggles for this whole ordeal, and stood far to the side so that if that joint let go, I'd be out of the line of fire.

But get this: I took it into the studio to stretch the strings. I went through and stretched each string from low E to the high E....and when I stretched the high E, it fucking BROKE. I about had a heart attack. When's the last time a brand new string broke on me? Uh, maybe 10 years ago? FUCK. And I don't have any spare .009 E strings, as I play .010s on my guitar (yeah, I chickened out with this guitar and put 9s on it.)

So I said fuck it, and put an .010 on it.



There we go. It's at concert pitch. I'm going to let it settle overnight, and play some in the afternoon tomorrow. My initial testing had it sounding very nice. If all goes as planned, and it's still in one piece tomorrow, I'll start the finish work, which will be some primer, some black Rustoleum, and some clear poly.

Great job!

Cool.
I liked where the string snapped.
I can well imagine your reaction.

Update: It's holding tune just fine. The guitar sounds great. Neck is straight and the glue joint seems to be holding up. I'm going to start in on the finish work this weekend.

Drunken firework laden painting...sounds win to me.

Are you keeping the guitar to play, or was this just practice? Ah, nevermind. I saw that you are planning to ebay it. How much are you looking to get for it?

I'll be happy if I get $200.

I did the grain fill on the exposed wood yesterday and did the final shaping...Gonna sand it a little smoother and put the primer on today. It's already masked up and ready to go.

Okay, here's a few more pics. Now that the structural part of the repair is done, I can start on the finish. Be warned: I've never done an area finish repair before, and I'm liable to screw this up.

So you know, the general steps to applying finish to bare wood are as follows:

1. Sand it smooth.
2. Grain fill. They make products for this, and you can also just use superglue or epoxy. This fills in the little divots in the grain, leaving a perfectly smooth surface.
3. Primer.
4. Paint. Usually around 3 coats, for an enamel finish.
5. Clearcoat. This is a modern guitar finished in various stains/dyes with a topcoat of polyurethane, which I'm going to try to match. The headstock in particular is painted black on the front (where the logo is), and was stained on the back, but I sanded through that to uncolored wood.

So here we are. I started with the grain fill, with some thick super glue. You just glop it on. I've since learned that you can take a razor blade to it to smooth it out.



Once that dried, I sanded first with 220 grit, and then 400. It's starting to look pretty smooth.



Then the back of the headstock gets the same treatment. 220, then 400. It feels very smooth to the touch at this point.



Out into the 95 degree heat we go. This is primer I'm spraying, just a very light coat.



Not bad, not bad...it looks glossy because it's wet.



Another angle. Starting to dry up a little.



RUH ROH! Looks like I missed a bit of grain fill on the back. Blow this picture up; you can clearly see the pits.



SO, after a little more superglue, a little more sanding, and a little more primer - it looks a lot better. There's a couple of tiny pits but nothing that will be noticeable under 4 or 5 coats of poly.



This is my task tomorrow: Gently sand with 800 grit and get things nice and smoooooooth. Once that's done, a careful cleaning followed by the first coat of black enamel. I'll probably change up my mask pattern too since the whole back of the headstock needs to be sprayed.

Sanded with the 800 on the primer today. I wet sanded and it went through just a little tiny bit, but not enough to make me worry. So I pulled my mask off, remasked for the area I wanted to paint black, and sprayed the black gloss today.

It was 95+ out so I wound up with some orange peel. However, there's solutions to orange peel. All in all I think it's looking good so far.

Here's the back. I'll sand off some towards the serial # to complete the fade.



Front's looking awesome, which is the money shot. You can see the mask line, which I'll sand away, and the orange peel, which I'll knock down with some sanding as well.

Awesome.

Nice.
Use a faster host for the photos, dude - please.

Heh, for one, many are pretty big photos (1mb+). I also host them on my home internet connect (~640mbit up) and in addition, my web server is my old T1 machine.

Yeah, you read that right. My T1 machine.

Abit 440BX baby. It's a BH6 with 384MB RAM and a 700mHz proc. Running Suse linux.

Thanks for the compliments regardless. This is my first time trying to feather in a finish and it's been interesting. The structural repair was interesting and I learned a lot, too. I will be very proud of this guitar.

Why not use tinypic or some other hosting service to save your bandwidth?

Unfortunately, that's all I have to provide to this thread other than interest

Yeah, fine, okay, I'll try to figure out tinypic. It's just so easy to use my own host.

I need to repaint the black - when I sanded off the orange peel yesterday, I sanded through on one corner. So back to the paint booth (my porch) it goes.

I'm worried because the black I'm putting on it looks a little cloudy compared to the factory black.

All the pics were moved to Photobucket, so it'll be a little faster now.

A little?
It's like night and day.
Thanks!

How does the guitar sound?

When I had it strung up, it was actually pretty awesome. I thought it sounded better than my other PM20 (the goldtop I did the neck repair on). I was afraid the glued-up headstock would affect the tone, but if it did, I can't tell.

I resanded (at 2000 coarseness) and resprayed 2 coats of black tonight.

The first coat looked fine. After 90 minutes, I sprayed a second coat. It looks like shit. I can see parts where it's peeling up. I'm going to have to sand it off AGAIN and respray AGAIN.

Rustoleum sucks. I should just bite the bullet and get some really good paint.

Grrrrrrrr