Can't go wrong with a spruce top and mahogany sides and neck.Well done Texas.......

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The blues ain't nothin but a good man feelin bad.

I meant to say 1900, I guess my fingers weren't communicating with my brain.


I just snapped those pictures really quickly today, there will be better ones to come.

Sweet Leaf does sound good, I like those. There's a little mexican market just up the street from the shop, that's usually where I get my drinks when I feel like treating myself. These are some of my favorites, Jarritos.

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No prob, I'll snap one of the back tomorrow. I haven't even gotten the chance to dust it off and get rid of those steel strings yet.

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Cool find Texas!

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.

You certainly came out ahead on that deal TGS,to get a lesson in guitars repair and then get to keep your project is an ideal situation.BTW maybe Nonni who is from Scandinavia could shine some light on the guitar and the company,if it's tied in with Goya then it's also connected most likely to Hagstrom as a lot of Hagstrom and Goya models were identical save for the logos.

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'65 Strat,65 Mustang,65 Jaguar,4 more Strats,3 vintage Vox guitars,5 Vox amps,'69 Bassman with a '68 2-15 Bassman cab,36 guitars total-15asst'd amps total,2 vintage '60s Hammond organs & a myriad of effects-with a few rare vintage ones.

I love Jarritos!! Especially the Naranja flavor (orange)...

Happy NGD, by the way!

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Good Vibes To Y'all!



Screamin' Armadillos
Texas Roadhouse Music
Guitar/Slide Guitar/Harp/Vocals

I found the 1975 Professional and Beginner catalogs, but my guitar isn't mentioned in either of them. The closest thing I could find was the Classic 2 in the Professional catalog, they both have the same rosette. None of them have that rosette with a triple bound stripe down the headstock. In fact, other than that one picture Ceri posted, I can't find any others. Much less come up with one that is for sale or sold. My ballpark guess of it's worth in it's current condition is about $150, maybe $300 if it were playable.

http://www.vintage-guitars.se/Levin_catalogs.htm

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That cool find just got much cooler Texas

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.

i love classical guitars (it's the only acoustic guitar i need considering i'm in a portuguese folk band as well) lately i've been thinking of installing a pickup on one for me to use it live for my band as well

Well, I worked on it a little bit today. Mainly I just got those stupid dead steel strings off out of the tuners and cleaned it up a little. I also looked inside of it. At first, I thought everything was okay, which would have been unbelievable. So my tech looked inside and found the two critical things I missed. One, a brace is completely missing. Even though I didn't spot a broken brace, I failed to spot the glue line where one used to be on under the top of the guitar just below the soundhole running from across it from waist to waist. Two, there was part of a brace unglued, but it was a back brace. He says the back brace won't be hard to fix.

The missing top brace is more troublesome. But we came up with two ideas for that. Either we're going to use a brace from the parts that my boss wants to build an acoustic guitar from or we're going to cannibalize a brace from one of the other junk guitars which have been left at the shop over the years. If neither of those ideas work out, I might find myself having to build one. But in any case, we expected to have problems with the braces and it's definitely going to be interesting to learn how to fix them.

We also tried to close the gap in the split in the top. We tried pulling them together with a strap, and it closed up a little bit but definitely not all the way. And we pulled it as tight as we possibly could without shattering the body. He said we're going to let it sit overnight and see what happens. If they come together than that's a great sign and the guitar has a good chance of coming back together nicely. If not I'm still going to use it as practice for learning to reglue braces and bridges, but it may or may not turn out all right. So I'm just going to hope and pray that it all works out the best it possibly can, I really want to save this guitar.



Here's the picture of the back, sorry I couldn't get a better one. I didn't want to mess with it after we got the strap on. The neck has a skunk stripe all the way down it and the mahogany back and sides look nice up close, especially after I wiped them clean.

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Thanks for posting, your discoveries have me thinking this will turn into a favorite instrument and beautiful sounding one as well, Texas. Those pic's are great!

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.

I definitely hope so.

In the event that the top doesn't come together with the strap, do any of you have any suggestions about how to preceed from there? Would simply filling the split in with glue work? I'm thinking that may not be the best thing to do for it tone wise. There's a brace running directly underneath the split, which is something to bear in mind. I was also reading up on splinting wider cracks in guitars. I know they made wood veneer which is extremely thin, and I'm thinking that I might be able to create something of a skunk stripe down the body where that seam is. But that might be a more large scale project than the guitar is worth. And considering I've never done anything like that before I'd probably have to lean heavier on my tech for that. He's really doing this out of the kindness of his heart so I don't want to take him away from his paying work any longer than I have to.

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'Morning TGS: hey, this thread just gets more and more interesting.

Even at a glance I'm sure we can tell that the split is not going to close up with clamping; it is too big. So now we're into grown-up luthiery. Do you or your tech have The Guitar Player Repair Guide? If not I so strongly suggest the very first thing you do is get a copy; it will be the best few bucks you ever spend on guitars. In that book Dan Erlewine devotes a whole 25 page chapter just to acoustic body repairs and most of that is about bracing issues and splits - just as on this guitar of yours. So obviously there is far too much to convey on a forum, especially in the detail you need to do this thing right. You've got to look at the book.

But in short what you do is this. You chisel out a narrow channel with a square end to it a little longer than the split itself, so that the split is entirely removed and therefore can't reopen and travel further later. You will almost certainly find that the split runs between the grain lines on the timber, and you take care to keep your chiselled channel between them also. Then you take a sliver likewise cut from the pale wood between the grain lines of a piece of patching spruce bought just for this very purpose and carve it to precisely fit the channel you made, just loosely enough for glue to fit in round the edges. Glue takes up a tiny but appreciable amount of space. Secure it in place with hide glue and job done. Simple as that (haha).

Stew-Mac sell pieces of spruce for exactly this reason:

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Bodies,_nec ... _Wood.html

Not expensive, and that and a spot of hide glue are all you need to spend on this task, cashwise. Time and skill are a different matter. We're into real luthiery here, and at the beginning of the chapter Dan has a couple of things to say on that. On the one hand this is a job that really should be done by a highly experienced professional. On the other hand, we all have to start somewhere and an old damaged guitar that didn't cost you much and that will otherwise be scrapped is the very place to learn. So have at it!

But study up on it very thoroughly first, so that you understand fully what you are trying to achieve. Good luck.

By the way, a couple of side points. I'm a bit uncomfortable at the sight of that strap around the guitar body. Much better would be the right sort of clamp, in this case known as a "sash cramp" (or sash clamp: carpenters often refer to clamps as cramps). This is good because you can turn that screw thread to apply exactly the amount of pressure you need, neither more nor less. What you need are some cheap, light, aluminium/aluminum cramps, like this:



If you Google "aluminum sash clamp" you will find those available for a surprisingly small price.

Proper carpenters/joiners such as Forum users Gridlok and Shredd would rightly turn their noses up at them, because they are too light for serious work. But that is exactly what makes them ideal for luthiery. I have several and use them for various tasks. Here I am using them for center-joining some iroko (an African mahogany type timber) to make an electric guitar body blank:



And here they are closing splits, this time in the solid body of Nikininja's fire damaged Strat:





Just out of interest, violin tops are quite prone to splitting too, and violin makers have a specialist brace exactly for this purpose:



My old dad is a violin nut and just the other day was showing me a book with photos of the insides of famous historic fiddles. It was amazing to see all the patches and repairs on the underside of the soundboards of some of the most highly rated instruments on the planet. So don't be put off by the work needed on your Swedish guitar: go to, do a great job and give this instrument a new lease of life.

Cheers - C

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Reading that book was a prerequisite for being hired. It's great, I love it. Last night I reread the entire 25 page chapter. Some if it I already knew from watching other repairs being worked on in the shop, but some things were new to me. Like the idea of splinting an open crack. I'm assuming that's what it would need, and that filling it in with glue or wood filler would probably have a more negative affect on the tone of the guitar than a splint would.


What sort of chisel will I need? I know they mentioned a V-shaped chisel in the book, but is that a specialty sort of tool or one I can find at a hardware store? I'm sure we have chisels lying around the shop, so I can probably find one there.

The crack extends through the rosette. But on the side of the soundhole it's a tighter crack than in the middle of the body, where it's worst. I'd like to try to keep the rosette intact, but would I have to chisel along the entire crack?


Excellent! I was expecting to pay a lot more for something like that, and with three pieces I might be able to practice on some scrap wood first.


Do you know of any other book (or website) that look even more in depth at repairs like this one? I think I have a good general idea of what to do, but something step by step with photos would be great.


I think we have some bar clamps in the shop. If not, I'll drop by the hardware store and get some. The strap is as of right now an experiment in seeing how far the crack will close, but for actual gluing I want to be want sure it's set up with something a little more solid.

I'm definitely going to make sure no one trashes it. Even if it takes longer and needs more work then we originally thought, I'm still up for trying to fix it.

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Texas, Ceri, this gets my vote as the coolest Fender Lounge thread (NGD category) so far this year , I might give this a try with an old neglected acoustic classical guitar. If I should find one in the future

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you can save the world with your guitar one love song at a time it's just better, more fun, easier with a fender solid body electric guitar or electric bass guitar.