Job Done!

Stripping off the elastic bandage after about 18 hrs revealed very little glue residue and that all cleaned up quickly with a cloth and some warm water. The glue line isn't as clean as when it came from the factory, but doesn't look terrible either. I was happy to see that the paint breakaway at the body joint had glued back almost imperceptively. 

I glued the nut back on with a small amount of Titebond and left for a few hours. Reconstruction complete 😀.

Strung up with a new set of D'Addario strings, I could then give the truss rod a tweak to take the very slight bend out of it. The picture doesn't really show this well, but it's pretty much ruler straight now.

All done and it plays quite nicely (for a  budget guitar!). It's certainly much easier to play than before the repair. As I said in the intro, the sound is pretty weedy, due to the nature of the ABS back and sides. It will be interesting to hear it through an amp. All ready to go to a beginner guitarist I have in mind now.

Summary & Lessons Learned: 

This has been probably the scariest job I've done to date and yet proved to be pretty straightforward really. 

I am really delighted that I took the route of repairing the truss rod rather than buy a new one. The whole project cost me less than £10 including glue etc and is probably a better end result than if I'd bought a new rod.

I've already mentioned that I should have scored the paint between the body and fingerboard extension, which would have prevented the paint flaking away. I was lucky that this glued back OK - it could have been a lot worse.

Also, when I glued up the fingerboard, I should have clamped the joint at the nut end more rigidly. There wasn't quite enough pressure from the elastic at that point and the joint lifted very slightly; not enough to affect the structural integrity or playability, but it would look better. I'll make a couple of specific clamps for this on the next job.

Other than that, I'm really pleased with how this went. I understand how a truss rod works now and feel totally up for attacking the Faith fingerboard now to resolve the iffy neck repair.

Watch this space....

Reglueing the Fretboard

Time to re-assemble and glue the fretboard back on :-)

First, I prepared the 2 mating faces by scraping to remove the old glue residue. I heated the surface with a hairdryer as I did it to help soften the glue. 

I'd tried to get hold of some very long elastic bands to use to "clamp" the two parts together but the only ones I could find were from America! Then I thought of using sections cut from an old bike inner tube, which would have worked. 

But what I ended up using was an old "resistance band" from when I was doing physio on a neck injury a couple of years ago. I split it in half and it was perfect for the job.

Masking tape was stuck over the truss rod to keep the glue off it. Then TiteBond glue applied and spread into a thin layer, before removing the masking tape.

The glue will spread sideways under pressure, but should stay off the truss rod. Next I temporarily clamped the fretboard in place, including a small clamp to ensure that it was correctly located side-to side.

Then wrapped the elastic band tightly round the neck, starting at the nut end and removing clamps as I went. It's surprising how much pressure you can apply like this. I've cleaned off any glue that's squeezed out as I went along but I'm sure I'll have to stilll  get some off once it's set. In theory, the rubber band shouldn't stick to it - we shall see. Now just need to leave for 24 hours to cure.

Repairing the Truss Rod - 2

The initial attempt to make a new threaded insert for the truss rod didn't really work. I heated the end of the steel bar up to "cherry red" and then formed a mushroom shaped head on it by hitting with a hammer, but it wasn't really working well and the shape of the rod was deforming too much.

So I changed tack and tapped a thread onto the end instead; then put a self-locking nut on and peened the end of the rod over the nut (so it couldn't come off).

I'm pleased with the end result - it should work fine.

The next stage was to cut the bar to length and then tap a thread onto the other end to take the adjustment nut. Then reinstall the threaded rod into the truss rod channel.

I'd managed to find the washer from the rod rattling around inside the guitar, so reassembled using the new bullet adjuster nut that had arrived.

This shows how the rod is adjusted with an allen key. Just adding half a turn of tension produces quite a bend in the rod, though I'm sure it will be less pronounced when restrained in the neck.. 

And this shows how adjustment will work once the fingerboard is re-glued. 

Repairing the Truss Rod - 1

I've decided to try option 3 first - making a new threaded rod to fit into the existing truss rod. 

Seems to me that Option 2 would cost too much by the time I've paid someone to weld a new piece of round bar to extend the broken one, and I'd still have to buy a new truss rod nut.

Option 1 - buying a new truss rod - is feasible. You can get them off EBay for less than £15. But I'd have to adapt the neck, either by glueing in packing pieces or routing out a bigger channel.

So I'm trying Option 3 first, with a fall back on Option 1.

I'm going to buy a length of 5mm round bar from the local DIY store:

 and I've ordered a new truss rod nut off EBay:

So, total cost so far is £7.75!

I'll have enough steel to have 2 attempts and worst case is that I fall back on option 1, but I'll already have the truss rod nut to use.

Truss Rod Inspection

With the fingerboard removed, I can see exactly what the problem is. The end of the round threaded bar in the following photo should extend about another inch - this is the point where it has snapped off.

There should then be a threaded nut, something like this picture below, attached to the end.

This is where the allen key fits to adjust the rod. Prising out the rod was easy - it sits in a well machined slot, but isn't glued in.

This next picture shows really clearly where the threaded portion snapped.

The rod can be pulled out from the channel. It's an interference fit at the top end that stops it rotating when tightened.

As a quick aside, the small piece of bar that you can see left in the truss rod channel is fundamental to how the truss rod works. It means that, when the threaded rod is inserted in the channel, it actually has a curve set into it. When you then tighten the threaded rod, it is essentially being shortened and wants to straighten out, so the truss rod channel takes on the curve instead (in the opposite direction) and transmits that curved shape to the neck because it is fixed in place. 

So I think I have a couple of options now:

1. buy a new truss rod of matching length etc. I might need to machine out the slot a little or pack it out for the new one to fit, or
2. repair the existing rod by having a new piece of 5mm rod welded to the existing and cutting a new thread, and buy a new nut for the end.

Option 2 is probably my preferred option, depending on how much it will cost to do. 

Actually, there might be a third option, which would be to totally remake the threaded rod - heat the top and belt it "blacksmith fashion" to make a mushroom shaped head on it and then cut a thread myself. That is quite appealing 😃. Watch this space ...

Time for some ironing

I've done plenty of research on Google / You Tube etc and there is a fairly good concensus of how to do this job. Get some heat into the neck to melt the glue and then use a blade to "lever" the fingerboard and neck apart. Off we go then - how hard can it be?

First action, after removing the strings, was to remove the nut. Not too difficult - there is normally (in my experience of 3 projects!) only a small amount of glue just locating the nut. Using a block of wood and a couple of gentle taps with a hammer it soon came away. 

Some methods have you now removing a fret at each end of the fingerboard and drilling a small hole through the fret slot and into the neck, allowing you to use a couple of panel pins to positively locate the fingerboard back into the exact same position when re-glueing. I'm not doing that as I think I'd be more likely to damage the fingerboard removing the frets, so I'm going to rely on clamping side to side as well as down to the neck.

Now the slightly scary bit where the iron comes out! The idea is to use the iron to transfer heat into the neck by resting on the frets, which will conduct the heat into the joint. I have seen one suggestion to use a metal ruler between the iron and frets, which I guess would add some protection to the wood surface, but I thought I'd prefer to get the heat directly onto the frets. As it was, the upward bend in the neck meant that the iron probably wasn't actually in contact with a lot of the frets. 

I set the iron to high and with a bit of steam as well. Starting from the nut end, I left the iron balanced there for about 10 minutes.

The next stage needs a blade to prise open the joint. You can get various specialist "pallette" knives etc from luthiery suppliers. No doubt they would be the right thing to use on good quality work. For this project I just got two good quality Harris 2" decorating scrapers from a DIY store - one with a sharpened edge and one with a blunt edge. Very carefully, I prised apart the joint - it actually needed a really gentle tap with a small hammer to get going. 

Once the joint had started to open, I got some more heat on for a minute or two and then slid the blunt scraper in sideways under the sharpened scraper. Then, being very patient, it was a matter of working the blunt scraper down the neck a bit; applying more heat for a couple of minutes; and then prising the joint open a little more by using the sharp scraper between the blunt one and the fingerboard. It probably went at a rate of about an inch a minute?

I forgot to mention earlier that I taped up the finish on the body where it was going to be exposed to the blades and heat from the guitar, to try and protect it as best as possible. The next picture shows the way I used the 2 scapers well.

As I worked my way down towards the soundhole end, you could see a distinct upward set in the fingerboard. I'm not sure whether this was the heat and steam doing this, but fairly confident it would glue back OK. Just to be on the safe side, after removal I clamped the fingerboard to my workbench to dry out flat.

As I got to the part where the fingerboard is glued to the body, there were a couple of ominous "cracks", as the joint gave way, and then it just suddenly popped off.

The cracking noise was a small part of the paint finish parting company with the body - you can see the blue paint left on the underside of the fingerboard below. Not the end of the world - it is only about 1mm of visible paint at the junction. As a learning experience, I would carefully score down the junction between fingerboard and body with a sharp craft knife next time, which should avoid this happening again.

I was pleased to see how clean the joint surfaces were, with no wood broken away on either. They'll clean up really easily to reglue.