53 J-185 I found this very entertaining.

[jt]

1 hour ago, bobouz said:

Go to UMGF’s Technical Info section & read the ongoing “So this is how to remove the top from an old Martin (Rosa String Works)” thread.  Five pages worth of clarity on the dangers of leaving a guitar with Rosa, as he absolutely destroys a vintage 00-18.

Imho, he’s a potential menace to any vintage instrument that crosses his path.  Spread the word, so hopefully more instruments won’t have to suffer untold indignities.

This.

[Leonard McCoy]

On 10/19/2021 at 7:21 PM, Leonard McCoy said:

And I weeped.

The thing is that guitar repair and restoration work has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Nowadays there is information available on how to repair guitars of a certain vintage.

[j45nick]

2 hours ago, Leonard McCoy said:

The thing is that guitar repair and restoration work has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Nowadays there is information available on how to repair guitars of a certain vintage.

In about 1971, I hand-delivered a mid-19th century Martin "New Yorker"--a small-bodied rosewood guitar marked "CF Martin  New York"--to the Nazareth plant. The bird's beak headstock joint had let go, and the rosewood body had dozens of open cracks. 

I got it back in a heavy plastic bag inside a cardboard box, with a note from Martin  that they considered the guitar beyond repair. 

A young guy in Providence was just starting out in  guitar building and restoration. He took the job on, and did a stunning job, fitting dozens of tiny rosewood splices into the convoluted grain of the body. Of course, I then had little idea of what was entailed in a job like that, or how to do it. And of course, I don't know how well it was really done, but it looked great and the guitar played well.

I put a small classified ad in the New York Times, and two ladies drove up to Providence from New York, and bought the guitar, I think for about $1200 or $1500, which was a fair amount of money 50 years ago.

Anyhow, at that time, people did not necessarily place great value on vintage guitars that needed serious attention, and were not necessarily as concerned about doing a repair or restoration job in a manner that was consistent with the original construction of the guitar as we are today.

Gibson was a prime example of that approach back then, as the Zombywoof and I both know. Old guitars were just cheap old guitars, and if you sent it to Kalamazoo for repair, you never knew what you were going to get back. My first 1950 J-45 went back to Gibson in 1968 to re-glue a loose top, and came back looking like a brand-new 1968 J-45, which was not what I had in mind.

You still have to pick and choose carefully if you need major work done on a vintage guitar. There are a lot of hacks out there with little idea of what they are doing.

Caveat emptor.