Repairs

I rarely remember to take photos of repairs, but here are a couple worthwhile examples. I've had a lot of basses in the shop in recent years, so bass photos were my best examples.

Overall I would say that I have gotten the most renown for high quality setup of orchestral instruments. It's amazing how much more you can get out of an instrument with just a little more time and care in the setup.

Juzek Soundpost Crack Repair

The top of this bass was split in half by what were initially 2 weather cracks. If addressed right away they could have been relatively minor. However, they were not addressed until they had spread across the entire bass. The upper bout crack terminated at the f-hole and the lower bout crack passed the upper portion of the f-hole crossing the soundpost area.

In order to properly reinforce a soundpost crack you must fit a patch that goes through most of the top or back. Without this reinforcement the post will continue to cause the crack to re-open. 

Soundpost cracks are often the death of inexpensive instruments because of the labor involved in the reinforcement.

Juzek Soundpost Crack Repair

Without the interior photo this image would be unremarkable. As you can see from the interior, though, there is a pair of cracks that together span the length of the instrument. I should have taken a before photo.

Aligning a larger crack can be really tricky because the longer the crack is the less inclined it is to go where it came from. Not to mention the difficulty of working with larger spans to make sure you have the entire crack aligned. In a case like this you want to dry clamp the entire crack, but work in sections rather than glueing the entire crack in one run.

If it is really well aligned, then retouch is a breeze. This one came together really well, and only a luthier will spot the repair.

Flatback Bass Crack Cleat

This is the internal bracing repair and spline. The entire wing had come off at least once before and was badly repaired. A spline was necessary to restore a good glue surface.

Cleat arrangements can be tricky with neighboring cracks. Cleats should never end near each other on the same 2-3 grain lines. They should overlap or be spaced far apart. Edges must be feathered to prevent a rigid point where a crack is encouraged to form.

Improper cleat arrangements can actually cause new cracks, and this bass had a lot of that on both the top and the back, which was probably due to previous repairs.

Cleat and Edge Doubling

This is the inside of the top of that same fallback bass as in the previous photo. It was a total mess (see the before photo). This bass was worse off after the previous repairs, and I think some of the new cracks were the result of old repairs.

In order to restore glue surface I splined some areas and doubled the edge to reinforce across the many cracks and splinters.

Note once again that cleats overlap and have feathered edges. Some of these are cleats left from previous repairs, which were simply reworked because those cracks were not open. Near any open cracks the cleats were replaced after repair was completed.

Top Before Repair

It pains me to look at photos like this. There are so many issues with this. Fortunately the cleats do at least overlap, but the hard edges of the cleats are more likely to cause cracks at their edges.

The top had been poorly re-glued (probably many times), so there were many misaligned chips and pieces that simply could not be re-aligned.

Ultimately I felt I had no choice but to double the edge across the lower block area to strengthen the area across the cracks, and restore some glue surface where it had been mangled. Just the act of preparing this top for re-glueing was a lot of work. It does pave the way for this instrument to be maintained in the future as tops must be removed occasionally for repair.