Faith Naked Venus Neck Repair - Introduction

Project #1 - a Faith Naked Venus acoustic guitar, with a broken neck.

First the good bits. The Naked Venus has a great reputation. They were voted UK's Best Acoustic Guitar in 2013 (not sure who by - possibly Faith !!). 

https://www.faithguitars.com/guitars/by-series/naked-series/product/125-fkv-venus-concert-cutaway-electro

The specification is all solid wood with spruce top and mahogany sides, back and neck. There is very little ornamentation on the guitar, except for some very beautiful detailing in the abalone rosette and fret markers, and it has a very limited satin finish - the theory being that the tonewoods are given maximum opportunity to resonate, and this is borne out by the very positive reviews it gets. It comes with an onboard tuner and under saddle pick up / preamp.

I think this one is about 6 or 7 years old. It has a few small scars from being played, but I'm fine with that - I want it to become my "out and about" / festival guitar.

The Naked Venus is still a current model and retails (2019) at just over £500. I got this one for £90 off EBay, but unplayable with the broken neck. I thought it would be a quick and easy fix, ready for the 2018 festival season (12 months ago!) ......

When it arrived, the break was found to be proper nasty on 3 counts:

• Firstly, it has cracked almost horizontally, leaving a very limited area of wood to re-glue and meaning that the glue plane would be under a large shear force when the strings are back on.

• Secondly, someone had already tried to repair it and it had failed again, so the faces of the break are covered in old glue, which makes it very difficult to re-glue. (When I started stripping it down, I found a bill for the previous repair inside the body, for £20 more than I paid for the guitar :-) )

• Thirdly, the fingerboard has also detached for part of the way down the neck, and is also contaminated with old glue residue.

Here's the damage:

So, I have spent a long time thinking about the options for how to repair this. 

1. initially, I thought I would clean up all the old glue faces as best I could and then use marine epoxy to re-glue. Known for sticking to anything like wotsit to a blanket and having very good gap-filling properties, I thought this would definitely stick it back together but would probably look a bit raggy and also have a good chance of failing again because of the location of the crack.
2. As first option, but rout out a narrow channel either side of the truss rod and glue in a carbon fibre rod to add strengthening across the joint. This would mean taking the fingerboard off and reinstating afterwards.
3. As an alternative to this, I thought I could cut away a long parallelogram of the neck across the joint (say about 2" long) and create 2 scarf joints, so that I'd have a much bigger glueing face.
4. Given that I want to do a full build ultimately, I started thinking maybe I could make a new neck, as a practice for the full build.  I thought that, once I was happy I had a functional neck, I could rout away all of the mahogany from the back of the original headstock, so I was just left with the veneer and Faith logo etc, then reglue that to my new neck.
5. Confession time: I did contact Faith to see if I could buy a new neck but got no reply. That felt like a cop-out anyway, because the idea is to develop my woodworking skills.
6. I finally settled on what I think is a really elegant solution, after discovering this You Tube video https://youtu.be/owbEThXSACE
   Basically, you glue the neck back together, but only to provide enough strength to work on it. Then you rout out a channel down each side of the neck, perpendicular to the joint and extending past it and then glue in a new matching section of wood. Then you rout across the back face of the neck, again across the joint and extending past it, and glue in a new facing piece, before shaping everything and refinishing it.
   

This is kind of the way I was thinking in option 3 (letting in a parallelogram of new wood), but broken down and done in a very much more managed way, so that everything should stay in alignment. It also means that I don't need to remove the fingerboard, as I should be able to resolve that as part of the fix.

This method gives a nice big glue area and also strengthens the joint. It should also allow me to end up with a reasonable finish, although I am not going to really try and hide the repair.

Well, now that I have discovered that method, there's no stopping me. The first festival is in a week's time and the target is to take it with me to play!

Well, that was a bit of an absence!

I've been away for a bit - like 3.5 years! But the next guitar project is finally getting underway, so I thought it would be good to document it for the benefit of anyone else that might stumble upon this resource.

Why the big absence? Well, life has intervened over the last few years with a whole myriad of distractions, including all of the usual life events but, most significantly, moving house and getting married! I've also carried on my "restoration" theme on other projects, with a brief diversion back into motorbikes, lots of DIY and restoring an old sailing dinghy....

... from this:

... to this:

 

This is Tally, a 60+ year old Heron class dinghy, and she is just about to return to the water. Based on the non-tidal section of the Dee at Chester, I'm looking forward to some gentle pottering and cruising on the Dee and possibly further afield at Bala or the Lake District.

The big project in terms of guitar work has been to build myself a workshop, so I now have somewhere to do woodworking projects, instead of balancing on a kitchen worktop!

Over the last year, I have been slowly been gathering a couple of worthy guitar projects to test my skills before launching into a build, the first of which has just started... read on. 

Elecy-Ukey-Layley

When I was at Shrewsbury Folk Festival, I just couldn't resist this cute little electric ukelele!

Yet another thing to do - now I need to learn how to not be as crap at that as well!

The Next Big Thing ......

I really enjoyed this little mini-restoration and started thinking about what I might do next. I've been looking on and off at the acoustic guitar kits that companies like Steward-MacDonald do and thought I might try making something like this mahogany dreadnought.

Then I though I might look at their little Ukelele kit first, the logic being that I could try out the techniques on something cheaper first before committing to the full thing. But when I looked at the process for this, the "hard stuff" like the bindings and purfling doesn't occur on the uke, so there didn't seem to be a lot of value to doing it.

Lots of internet research later and I kept coming back to a few blogs about people that had built their own acoustics from scratch. These weren't guys with huge workshops - one was built pretty much on the kitchen table! 

Looking at the process in detail, I decided that I'm pretty handy and have done a fair bit of woodworking in the past (nothing as fine as this though) and individually there is nothing in each part of the process that really terrifies me, so I'm thinking of building one from scratch!

Two books are constantly referred to:

Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology - A Complete Reference for the Design and Construction of the Steel-string Folk Guitar and the Classical Guitar (Guitar Reference) - William R. Cumpiano & Jonathan D. Natelson

and

Build Your Own Acoustic Guitar: Complete Instructions and Full-Size Plans - Jonathan Kinkead

I have bought both of these as research to help the decision before I commit and I'm currently deeply absorbed in them! The first book is very much the set text - there appears to be nothing it doesn't tell you about making a guitar, but it is quite dry. The second is more like a Haynes manual by comparison, with lots of colour photos showing each step. Between the two, it is fairly easy to get a good grasp of the processes involved.

There are some fairly consistent messages coming out of all of this research:

1. you will probably spend as much if not more on tools as you do on materials the first time round.
2. It's not worth doing this just to get a nice guitar - I think this is going to need about a £600 investment in tools and materials for the first one; that money will buy you a very nice guitar.
3. as long as you take your time and are careful, your first guitar will probably sound very good compared to mass-produced, but the detail finish may be a bit lacking.
4. you are unlikely to just build one, as it can become addictive.
5. by the time you get to the 3rd or 4th one, they should be pretty good!

I have quite a lot going on at the moment with a new job etc so, unusually for me, I'm not going to rush into this. I am thinking that I might try and do a trial of the bit that I'm most nervous about, which is constructing and carving a mahogany neck and building the dovetail joint between the neck and body. If I can make a decent job of that, I reckon I'll be OK to go for the full thing.

Watch this space!

Meanwhile, I'm keeping up the guitar practice - still trying to do at least half an hour for 4 days a week, and I am definitely still not as crap today as I was yesterday :-).

Update

Well I guess I should post an update on how this finished, as I got so carried away at the end, then lost the progress photos off my camera, so can't really detail anymore of the restoration.

The neck ended up really nice after about 6 coats of the oil. I left it for a week after the last coat, then gave it a good rub down with a cloth and it turned out like all the internet wisdom suggested: a nice smooth satin finish which was very playable.

The body was finished then and I had to decide whether to make and fit a scratchplate. I made a couple of card templates and it just didn't look right with one, so I decided to leave it off for now. I was growing quite used to the battered look and didn't feel the need to cover up the scrapes and bumps!

Next job was to make a saddle from a new piece of bone that I'd bought. This was a fairly simple exercise. First I glued the old one back together with superglue and used that as a template to mark out the approximate shape on the new blank. This was then sanded to shape and also the thickness reduced so it would fit into the carrier on the bridge. Lesson learned from this was that I assumed the original one was the right size - actually I could have made it 3 or 4mm longer and it would have been a better fit, but it's worked out OK for now.

That was it then - refit the electrics and tuning pegs and string her up!

I am delighted to say that all of the bracing repairs etc held together when the string tension was re-applied and she played nicely for a £50 guitar! The overall character was exactly as I had remembered the current model APX500 when I tried one of those, which was a bit of a "thin" sound compared to a full dreadnought size guitar, but the body is significantly smaller. These are really designed for the electro-acoustic side I think. I had some fun playing through the amp too. It actually turned out exactly as I thought, which was nicer to play than the basic entry level F310 I have (a much nicer neck on it), but with less bottom end sound due to the smaller body.

The action was a little high so, after letting it all settle for a couple of weeks, I reduced the height of the saddle to give about 2mm clearance at the 12th fret and this made it much nicer to play. No need to go into detail of how to do this here - there are loads of YouTube videos etc about it. Just take it easy and don't take too much off at a time.

You might remember that one of the reasons for getting this was to be able to take it to festivals without worrying too much about it getting damaged. In the end, when Shrewsbury Folk Festival came around in August, I just couldn't bear not to take my "good" guitar, which is sounding better and better the more I play it (I'm sure IT is getting better, not ME!) so this one stayed at home.

But the story has a nice ending, as my son started making noises about getting a guitar to take to Uni with him, so it has found a happy home at Lancaster University :-).

Applying the goo...

And hot on the heels comes the next part.

With the prep done, I gave the neck a final rub down with 0000 gauge wire wool and wiped down with white spirit to make sure all of the dust/grease was removed.

I am using Tung Oil to refinish the neck. I haven't used it before but perceived wisdom on the internet suggests it should give a good smooth, satin finish which appeals to me. Also it means I don't have to spray it, as it is a "wipe on, wipe off" type finish. Oh and it's cheap - I think the tin cost me less than £5.

Again, researching on the net, it is recommended to use coffee filters to apply and rub  the excess off! The tin says to use a "lint free cloth". I never really know what that means and a box of filters was a couple of quid, so I'll give it a go.

The tin says to apply a couple of coats thinned 50/50 with white spirit; apply sparingly; leave for 30 minutes then wipe any excess off.

Here's the result after the first coat. The change of shade you can see on the headstock is where the neck has been scarfed together from 2 pieces (from new). 

And below is the area of the repair (see last post), which I think will blend in just fine with more coats on.

So now, the process is: leave 24 hrs; apply more tung oil; leave 30 minutes; wipe off excess; repeat. I think it will probably need 5 or 6 coats. Then I'll leave it for a few days to make sure it has fully dried.

I think we are onto making a new saddle next :-).

Neck Preparation

After a slight pause while I went off on a cycling holiday and then started a new job, I've made a start on the guitar again last night. After my last post, the neck had been rough sanded back to remove the existing lacquered finish.

The next stage was to fine sand the neck to get a smooth finish. I am doing this in two stages - first with 120 grade fine sandpaper and then before I apply the finish I'll take it down finally with 0000 grade wire wool. Here's the neck after sanding with the fine sandpaper:

As part of this prep, I need to fill in and try to conceal a previous repair. One reason for doing the fine sanding early was to "harvest" some of the sawdust to use in that repair:

Here's the old repair - a really ugly scar. It's not flush with the surface and you can see the glue that was used.

The first thing to do was to "gouge" out the surface glue with a knife. It starts looking worse before it gets better!

Next, I propped up the guitar so that the site of the repair was horizontal and stable. You can see my sophisticated workshop and equipment here!

I then tipped some of the sawdust into the scar, tapping the neck to make sure it settled well into the crack.

Next, I applied a few drops of Super Glue to the sawdust. The theory said that the sawdust should suck the glue straight through it and into the crack, but I found that the glue sat on the surface. It did bleed through after a short while though.

The problem was that I had to put a bit more on because of that and some of it ran round the neck ....

(It was OK though - that sanded off fine at the next stage. Phew!) After leaving the glue to harden for a couple of hours, I sanded the repair back down with medium sandpaper, being very careful to just sand the repair and not the surrounding wood, as I didn't want to create a "hollow" in the neck. Then I fine sanded again. I was really pleased at the result - a nice smooth repair. Although it is darker than the surrounding wood, this is the colour that the whole neck is likely to end up after the next stage and I think it should blend in really well.

Finally, a wipe down with white spirit to get rid of dust and it's looking even better. I'll do the wire wool rub down just before I start to apply the new finish at the next stage.