Our latest “angry girlfriend/boyfriend” tragedy—with
gruesome hammer wounds. |
This is a cautionary tale about some of the
horrible things that we do to our guitars—
and how we might avoid them. Perhaps we’ll
make this part one, with these being my stories,
and part two will feature the stories you
send us. We all have these “I got a buddy
whose guitar got…” stories, and they are
always fun. I will break mine down into a few
categories: shipping damage, bad repairs
damage, accidental damage, and intentional
damage. I must caution you, though—these
are rated PG-13 for graphic violence.
Shipping Damage
Let me start by saying that we ship guitars
every day, all over the world, and we very
seldom have any problem. For the most part,
the big shipping companies do a very good
job of delivering the goods in good order.
There are many ways to damage a guitar
during shipping, but I’ll start with two of the
most common injuries. If you need to ship
a guitar, always de-tune the strings and put
plenty of packing behind the peghead in
order to avoid what we call “whiplash peghead
injury.” This happens when the guitar
is handled roughly in its case and box, and
the weight of the tuners, along with the tension
of the strings, causes the neck to crack.
You can usually identify this injury by a small
crack that starts in the nut slot and angles
back into the meat of the neck. These are
very repairable, but needless to say could
and should be avoided.
The second most-common shipping injury is
what we refer to as the “atomic wedgie.” This is
when the guitar gets dropped while in or out of
its case—sometimes even in a case and a shipping
box—straight down on the tail end, causing
the wedge-shaped endpin to jam up into the
guitar and split the tail block. This one usually
cracks the end block but not the sides, and it can
be repaired invisibly by re-gluing the block. But
then you have the “atomic wedgie from hell,”
which is the same injury but more severe—with
the endpin being driven in until the shoulder on
the pin breaks and allows the pin to go in much
deeper. These usually break the sides at the tail
block as well, making for a stickier and more
expensive repair. Both types of wedgie can be
avoided by removing the endpin before shipping
and overstuffing the bottom of the shipping box.
Bad Repairs Damage
I won’t go into this too deeply here for lack of
space, as well as the fact that I will probably
step on some toes. But there are a lot of bad
repairs going on out in the world. That being
said, there are a lot of extremely talented repair
people, also. Your task as guitar owner is to sort
them out and find one you trust. If you have
been playing and owning guitars for a while, you
probably already have someone who has done
good work for you in the past, and at a reasonable
rate. If so, stay with them, and don’t go
seeking the advice of the latest self-appointed
Internet guru. There is a ton of bad advice being
dispensed out there, most notably in the area
of hot-rodding. Most of these alterations are ill-advised
at best, and potentially ruinous to your
guitar at worst. My take, for what it’s worth, is
that if you took the time you might spend trying
to gouge the “tongue depressor” brace out of
your guitar and used it to practice, you’d notice
a significant improvement in the sound coming
out of all your guitars—without setting them up
for what could be a catastrophic structural failure.
There I said it, and I’m sticking to it!
Accidental Damage
These stories always make guitar lovers cringe.
You have the “Leaned ’er up against the couch
and the dog knocked ’er over” tale. Then
there’s the “Leaned ’er against the wall and my
buddy’s chair broke, propelling him backward
through the top,” one. (This one happened to
Jeff Huss on one of his early self-built guitars.
Oh well, he didn’t like the top on that one
anyway.) You also get the “Put ’er in the case
at our local jam, but didn’t latch the case and
someone came along and picked up my case,
tumbling ’er out onto the floor” story. I did this
to my uncle’s Martin when I was a kid, and the
ensuing fallout caused me to never do it again.
Another version of this one is the ever-popular
“Laid ’er in the case but didn’t close the lid and
something fell on ’er.” We had this one at my
house years ago, and it involved my brother’s
guitar. I can’t really describe the sound of five
leaded wine glasses falling six feet down onto
the top of a D-35, but you can imagine. We
probably all know someone who “Set ’er down,
forgot ’er, and backed over ’er with the car.” Oh
my God! What’s worse than that one? The only
thing that comes to mind is when my friend, the
great bluegrass fiddler Les Woodie, told me he
had backed over a case containing not one, but
two of his best fiddles! Enough on this topic. I
think we’re all in a cold sweat by now.
Intentional Damage
OK, for anyone who didn’t slam the magazine
down and curse my name over in the repairs
section, wait until you get a load of this soapbox
rant. Hey, big music star, stop busting up
guitars in your stage show! This is not—and
never has been—cool. I don’t care if you are
Garth Brooks or Pete Townshend, the next
time you bust up a perfectly good guitar
instead of, say, donating it to a charity for
kids who can’t afford instruments, somebody
ought to pick you up by your neck and smash
you on the stage until you’re in pieces.
Lastly, we have the “angry girlfriend/boyfriend”
tragedy. We had one of these in the
shop recently with obvious hammer wounds
resulting in several huge holes in the top of a
new guitar. As they say, “Hell hath no fury….”
I would add that, if your spousal affiliate has
stooped this low, it may be time to move on.
As they say where I come from, “A woman
that’ll do that to you’ll cut you.”
Mark Dalton
Mark Dalton is a founding partner of Huss and Dalton
Guitar Co. When not building guitars, Mark and his wife,
Kimberly, tend to the draft horses and mules that inhabit
their farm in the Piedmont region of Virginia.