for the time being, my shop will be open Tuesday and Thursday, 1.00pm - 5.00pm
If those times don't suit, then please call or email and we'll work something out.
Meanwhile, I'm going to share some repair stories and guitar knowledge with you. I've always intended to do this (with perhaps a weekly post) but never quite got around to it. Hopefully this new situation that we're all in will spur me on to doing it! So here's the first installment, and it's a pretty dramatic one...
BROKEN HEADSTOCK ON A GIBSON OR GIBSON-STYLE GUITAR
Some of you will know that this is pretty common, but it's still pretty horrifying when it happens to your Gibson. The good news is that in at least 90% of cases the guitar is repairable, and will play, sound, and tune just like it did before the break. I use jigs and clamps to align the two halves of the break, apply a VERY strong wood-glue and a lot of clamping pressure, and it almost always works out fine.
Breaks that can't be fixed by aligning and gluing like this can often still be fixed, but may require a serious amount of work.
I've done at least one headstock repair, and perhaps quite on average more than that, every week since I started this gig forty years ago. That adds up to thousands of headstock repairs! None of them are quite the same - the way the wood splinters at the break point is different for each one - but they almost always go back together.
Not all of them are Gibsons, of course, but 99% of them have a Gibson-style angled headstock.
BUT!
Here is the point of this particular blog: This week I repaired a 2017 Gibson SG with a broken headstock. The guitar had "Grover" locking tuners.
Here's the thing: a guitar strung with 10-46 light-gauge strings has about 120 lbs of tension applied by the strings. OK. If this guitar was to fall, that tension would be a factor in how much force would be applied to that narrow bit of wood up by the headstock. But so would the weight of the tuning keys (machine heads).
I weighed the separated headstock. It weighed 87 grams. I then weighed the "Grover" locking tuners and they weighed 266 grams! That is, more than three times the weight of the headstock.
My recommendation is, that if you have a Gibson (or a Gibson-style) guitar that has these tuners, that you replace them with a vintage-style tuner set (such as Gotoh SD90). Your guitar has been drilled to 3/8" (10mm) and you will also need step-down collars. It's a lot cheaper than having a broken headstock fixed.
The SG photos are shown below.
