Buzzard Mountain Instruments : Blog

This 1992 Alvarez Yari came into my shop a week or so ago via a local music shop I do work for on occasion. The owner of this guitar plays really hard and it shows. The first 5 frets or so were worn nearly to the fingerboard on the first string, the nut and saddle where ground so low that every strings buzzed liked crazy and he had worn deep divots into the finger board at the first few positions. Here are a few pics of the condition it showed up in, I had already removed the first fret before I realized I should take some pictures.

After removing frets 1 through 5, I used a technique in which you score the divots with a razor blade, raise the grain with a knife and fill the holes with ebony dust and CA glue. Once this was complete I was able to sand down that portion of the fingerboard and the fix is nearly invisible, and will become less visible as it begins to wear again. After that I re-fretted the first 5 frets, leveled all of the frets and re-crowned them. Next I removed the existing nut and saddle and remade them with new bone. This raised the action a bit but not much. This guitar really needs a neck reset to restore it too proper action, but that was beyond what this owner wanted to spend. After some time setting it up this thing plays great again with no buzz even when played hard. Here are a few pictures of the finished repair.

This was a fun little project and I love to restore someones baby back to playable shape again.

There's been a lot going on around Buzzard HQ lately and today I started on a wonderful repair/restoration. I was sent this banjo and the owner really didn't know much about it, only that it has hung on his wall since the early 70's and had a Gibson tag on the inside. The banjo turns out to be an early 5 string conversion of a 1926 Gibson Tenor Banjo, this conversion was done sometime in the 60's I presume but may be earlier. The pot is stamped with a serial number 8257-30 and has a Tag that says "The Gibson, Gibson INC, Kalamazoo Mich.". A little research turned up that this pot was made in 1926 and was originally an open back tenor.

The current state of the banjo is pretty poor, the neck is bowed enough to make this banjo unplayable. So I am in the process of doing a restore on this thing, building a new neck, repairing the rim which was slightly mangled in the original conversion. The owner doesn't want a full reproduction of the original conversion or an original Gibson, he just wants a nice playable banjo. I'll post some more details and images as I progress, but for now here are some images of the banjo in the state it arrived in. The original banjo had coordinator rods if you look close you can see the holes for them.