Purpleheart Wood And Broken-down Geetars

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I didn't do any more work on repairing the mandolin today. My decision last night to use the purpleheart wood for the fret nut and as a bridge on the Silvertone Classical guitar delayed my progress until my brother and sister return from her granddaughter's wedding in Atlanta. It's my brother's wood and he's got it locked up in his business warehouse.

There is a family story about this particular stash of purple heart wood. It ended up here from having been used for harbor pilings down in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was said to stand up well against barnacles and other pests that attack the piers where the ocean vessels dock. It's been around here for years. I've helped my brother move it around to keep it dry a couple of times. Here is a link to a site that sells exotic woods that describes it:

http://www.thewoodbox.com/data/wood/purpleheartinfo.htm

He has boards of this wood that are an inch thick and twelve inches wide. Maybe twenty or more. It's probably worth a fair amount of money as exotic woods go, but I don't get the feeling that it's as rare as I once thought it was. I can't imagine I'll need more than a six inch by six inch piece of it to do what I wanna do.

The repair work I got going on the classical guitar is more complex than the work on the mandolin. I had to create a home-made jig to push the brace that had come loose back into the position it needed to be in. The top panel of the guitar body was bowed in where it was supposed to be flat. It has been that way for a long time and resists being pushed back into it's designed flattop position.

That one brace was a replacement piece where it had been repaired previously. I didn't make that repair. I suspect somebody tried to replace the original brace where the top panel sagged by working through the sound hole. They probably did the best they could considering how difficult it might be to have the limitation imposed by having to do everything through the sound hole.

I removed the bottom panel. Quite a bit of it had already come unglued and where it had it was easy to lift it up off the reinforced sides of the guitar body. Where the glue still held, however, was tedious and there was a real good chance the panel might break up if I didn't have a little luck getting it to separate from the stiff sides. Hopefully along the original glue line.

I used a medium large flat tip screw driver to pry it up. Some places I had to use a hammer to drive the screwdriver into the glue seam, but I was super cautious and had some good luck and got the panel off with only a little damage that can easily be repaired.

This is the first time I'm ever opened a guitar up like this. I was surprised as how much bracing there is inside where it's almost impossible to see without taking either the top or bottom panel off. The bottom panel has five braces that run from side to side all the way across the width of the body of the guitar.

All five of these braces are still glued in the middle of the brace, but the ends of them have come unglued. For a moment I thought maybe it was designed that way, but the glue marks along the ends of the braces told me different. I decided to glue each brace one at a time over the next few days.

The first one I glued today was the middle brace. I don't have the right tools to make it easy. Mostly I'm missing clamps, but I do have a couple of things that seem to have worked okay. One actual C clamp that worked quite well and a spring clip that I used for holding papers together.

It didn't take a lot of pressure to hold the wood together where I was gluing it. The instructions on the glue bottle states that I could take the clamps off after thirty minutes, as long as I didn't put any stress on the joint for 24 hours.

This first brace did require some pressure to pull the two pieces of wood tight where I was gluing them together. When I applied the glue and used the clamps to pull this first brace tight, the other four braces snuggled right up against panel. I doubt if I'll even have to clamp them in place when I glue them. More than likely, I'll have to pry them apart enough to get the glue all the way between them.

The last couple of days have been interesting. I've been remembering about how me and my brothers were all taught to use woodworking tools from an early age. We we all entered in tool judging contests where we each always had the highest scores in the state. Usually the highest. It's not like we were expected to become journeymen, just good enough to do what we could for ourselves if we couldn't afford to hire somebody.

By the time I get this guitar put back together I expect to have a good, strong instrument that has a fair tone and hopefully a clear ring to it. I'm thinking this glue I'm using is probably a lot better than the original glue due to the progress that's been made with glue materials and chemical knowhow.

I'm thinking the harder the glue becomes the more it will vibrate with the wood to get that "ring" I'm hoping for. It wasn't a bad sounding guitar even when it was falling apart. The real problem was that it wouldn't stay tuned for long.

By taking the back off of it I can see everything that has to be done. I don't think I can over-glue it as long as I wipe off the extra glue before it sets. I've been watching the glue turn color as it gets absorbed to some degree into the wood. It's a yellowish cream color when it comes out of the bottle, but as it dries it becomes clearer as if it's chemically bonding with the wood fibers.

If I take my time and do it right it will at least be a good practice instrument. I've claimed for a long time now that if I could ever learn to play the scales on a guitar I might turn out to be a pretty good player. I know that sounds weird to some people, but for me its a matter of confidence.

In the past when I tried to play music with other people they had to be able to play in the three or four keys I could play in or it was no go. I wasn't that much worse than many of the slackards like me I played with, but forcing other people to have to constrain themselves to my limitations was embarrassing to me, and that messed with my confidence. I didn't feel like I was really a musician if I was myself the bottleneck in playing with some variety and flexibility.

Again, a lotta that had to do with the fact that I moved around so much I didn't usually find myself in situations where I could keep the tools I needed to practice and learn about me. I was lucky to have that half-ass old Silvertone geetar. The one thing I had to offer a group was that I had a decent voice and I wasn't afraid to stand and deliver. Not having the confidence I wanted to play instruments along with the best of 'em was my crying shame.
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