Psalm 119:9

Psalm 119:9 - How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to Your word.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Braving the Perils of Guitar Maintenance

So, I've been telling myself forever that I needed to clean up my acoustic, but today I
finally did it! HAHA!! Actually, it started out as adjusting the truss rod in order to
lower the string height, but I started reading online and found out that a better way to
do that would be to remove the saddle from the bridge and file down the bottom,
thereby lowering the strings. As I did that, I went ahead and cleaned it up while the
strings were off.
  First, I took the strings off and pulled the saddle out:




















Filing down the saddle with 220 grit sandpaper:



In the next two pictures, you can see how dirty it was... yech.



Next step was to get the gunk off with some fine steel wool:
I got some almond oil to rub into the fretboard, and let it dry for a while. 



Re-stringing...




















...and Voila!



3 comments:

  1. Nice job Nathan! How does it play?

    ~Philip

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looking good!
    DId that help the action much?
    BJ

    ReplyDelete
  3. Actually, it didn't lower the action a whole lot, due to
    the fact that I was very careful not to take too much off!
    I'll probably have it professionally set up at some point.
    And it still plays as well as I could expect from a 30+
    year old instrument! B)

    ReplyDelete