I replaced the skin with a goat skin vellum. This is a difficult procedure, which involves wetting the skin and trimming it to size.

Once I’d tidied the frets and set up the banjo, it really began to sing.

On collection, the owner brought along some photos of her father, the banjo’s original owner.  She was also kind enough to allow me to scan them and include them in this blog.  His name was George Rusby.

George is fifth from the left on the back row.  I think these photos are great.  It makes me want to throw on some spats and dance the Charleston (or at least curl up with a good P.G. Wodehouse novel).

Sometimes it’s hard to believe what is on my desk.  Gibson only made SGs with front accessible controls in 1969.  It should have a bigsby trem, and a scratchplate.

It should also have a fingerboard.  What a mess.  This customer bought the guitar as is, as he knew that this could be a very valuable guitar with a lot of work.

The neck has been cracked a number of times, and I’m pretty sure that Gibson didn’t offer this model in cheap, badly applied black finish.

So, lots of work to do.  I started with a new fingerboard, and made a surface to glue the new fingerboard.  After this, a full refinish, sorting out the horror around the tailpiece posts (these had been replaced with cut off screws) and filling and tidying up the previous repairs on the neck.

This is the result.  New hardware. I made new scratchplates.  Note the Les Paul shaped scratchplate specific to this model.

The customer wanted a particular tone, and I was able to suggest my favourite combination of pickups:  Seymour Duncan 59 in the neck position, and a Seymour Duncan JB in the bridge position.  Great tones.  Bassy and rich for rhythm, and hot and powerful in the lead position.

I’m confident that this will be one seriously happy customer.

Just a quick one about a very unusual instrument that came by the Jim Fleeting Guitars workshop, for repair.

This is a zither.  It is a folk instrument, played with hammers, and is a precursor to the piano.  Other zithers include, amongst others, the hammer dulcimer.

My job was to clean it, replace the missing strings, and tune it.  Tuning it is much like tuning a piano.  You have a key that turns very stiff friction pegs that tighten the strings to pitch.

First, I attached a clip-on pickup to the soundboard:

Next I connected my pickup to my strobe tuner, and set to work.

There are 74 strings on this zither, and getting all 74 perfectly in tune was a long job.  Especially since it came to me not tuned up to pitch, so that bringing it up to full tension meant it had to be tuned twice.

There were 6 chords of four strings each, then 2 octaves of single note strings each one paired.  For anyone clever enough to know that makes 72 strings, there is a pair of high C strings, making it 74.

Fortunately, painted on the top of the zither was the tuning, which worked out to be very handy.