Things have been crazy-busy in the Haze workshop just lately. There’s sawdust and pickup wire and rusty nails and stuff everywhere. Apologies are in order, therefore, for my lack of posts here in the last couple of weeks. Sometimes the blog gets prioritised down—sorry about that.

I’ll try to make that up to you by showing you a pretty picture.

This is a snazzy guitar in emergent form. This is a budding axe, if you will. As you can see, it’s got a nicely figured top. A little more unusual than many of the figured tops you’ll have seen though (just a little). This is redwood. Pretty, isn’t it?

Now, this isn’t exactly a rare thing, but as many of you will be used to seeing maple tops on guitars, I thought I’d throw this in the mix. The photo shows the roughly cut-out body of the guitar. There’s no finish applied—I’ve just wet the top slightly to let the figure stand out a little.

I think you’ll agree, this is shaping up to be a handsome hunk of wood. I’ve got enough, nicely-figured, redwood for a few more instruments (any requests?) so this is likely to be the first in a redwood series. I can think of worse things to make guitars from.

One of the great things about repairing guitars is that, every so often, you get an absolute beauty through the workshop.  This was one of those guitars.  It’s a pre-war Martin and it’s just fantastic. It’s had a few bumps and scrapes over the 75-odd years of its life but it plays beautifully and sounds amazing.  This guitar has the blues seeped all they way through its mahogany and rosewood and when you play, it seeps back out again.  Brilliant.

This is one of the, occasional, instruments that I hate giving back to the owner after it’s been repaired.

Anyway the issue with this was a broken bridge.  The wood in front of the saddle had snapped off (and not for the first time as evidenced by signs of a previous repair).  After discussing the options, the owner settled on having a replacement bridge custom-carved for his baby.

In a three-part article over at the Guitarless blog, I step through the process from making this decision with the owner to removing the damaged bridge, carving a new one and replacing it.

Have a look here.  Hope you like it.

Some of you guys may already know that, from time to time, I write articles on guitar repair and on some of the various ins and outs of guitar hardware.

These articles are written as time allows and, sometimes, as interesting jobs come through my workshop.  Recent examples are published on the Guitarless blog. Guitarless is a guitar news site and, if you’re interested in guitars and basses, you could do worse than pop over and have a read.

As new articles get published over there, I’ll update here too so you can take a ganders.  Lots of these are ‘how-to’ features with instructions for working on your own guitar.  Some of them, however, are a bit more advanced than most people will be comfortable trying at home – these ones are mainly intended for your interest only.  If you’re reading this though, odds are you’re as much of a guitar geek as me and hopefully you’ll find something in them that will appeal.