This Harmony was in a pretty sorry state when it was brought in to the shop. It needed the bridge re-glued and the neck reset as it was essentially folding itself in half. This is pretty common amongst older ladder braced guitars. The guitar had great sentimental value to the owner and he wanted it restored to its former glory.
Here you can see where the neck has been pulled forward over the years. To get the correct angle, it’s going to have to come off and re-aligned.
Firstly, the fingerboard extention has to be removed from the top of the instrument. Heat is applied and a sharpened spatula used to break the glue joint.
Notice how the 12th fret has been removed. This is so we can drill a hole into the neck pocket in order to shoot steam inside, loosening the glue joint.
We made a jig which attaches to the body and pushes upwards on the heel of the guitar, removing the neck as steam is injected into the neck pocket. Here it is all set up and ready to go. The steam is generated from an old espresso machine found at goodwill. It gets hot real fast and doesn’t take long to loosen that glue joint.
And here’s what we find when the neck is removed. 60 year old hide glue, lovely stuff.
This will all be cleaned up, on both the male and female parts of the dovetail joint. Shims will likely be needed to true up the joint for reglue.
We weren’t going to take any chances putting it back on. The rubber bands give some great support to the clamps.
The new heel angle, with a nice tight fit.
And here’s how it turned out! This old harmony had a really great sound for blues fingerpicking, was nice to see it back in action.
