Introduction:

When it comes to repairs to the wooden parts of your guitar, your instrument is in capable hands with me.  I have reattached countless head stocks, repaired lots of cracks, and performed wood grafts in fingerboards and other places where chunks of wood were busted out.  I often have to graft in wood where screw threads are stripped out, or stud mounts are warn and loose.

Binding is also covered in this section, even if it is often not wood, it needs to go somewhere.

Reattaching head stocks

On Instruments with angled back head stocks, all it takes sometimes is for the instrument to fall over, and snap, the head stock breaks off because the wood grain does not follow the head stock angle.  I was in the audience at a show, and the guitarist with a Gibson Les Paul turned to signal the drummer, the singers face was in the way, and snap!  It was a bad day for the guitarist and singer, but a good day for me, since I got the job to fix it, thanks to the help of some of the clubs crew who knew me.

Before my time, it was standard practice to make guitars with a head stock capping AKA overlay, which is a reinforcement to overcome the weakness of the head stock.  On early Gibson Les Paul's they were made of ebony and around 3/32" (~4mm) thick.   Over time they grew thinner and thinner, until they were replaced with ones made of 1/16" (1.6mm) plastic in the late 60's or early 70's, and went missing altogether in the early 80's.  Not only Gibson, but most manufacturers fazed them out at one point or another to save money.  A few company's replaced the ebony with less expensive but sufficiently strong woods to do the job.

When I got started in this business, it was common practice to cut out the break, and graft in wood to make a complex joint and glue that together, as the glue available at the time, did not work well enough on its own.  Some luthiers including myself, urged instrument owners to allow us to add an overlay and other reinforcements, to prevent it from breaking in the future.

These days it is possible and common, to just glue the break (as is) back together, and guarantee that it will never come undone thanks to modern glues, but that does not prevent it from breaking again below or above the repair.  I still urge the instruments owner to let me add proper reinforcements and or an overlay depending on where the break is.  Beside reinforcement, an overlay adds mass to the headstock, and improves the sustain of the instrument.

Crack repair:

Although rare, there are cases where even a solid body can crack along the wood grain, due to force or climate.  It is possible to either glue a crack back together as it is, or to cut out the affected area, and graft wood in to close the gap.  The method I use depends on where and how the crack occurred, and on how the two sides fit together.

Wood Grafts:

Wherever wood grafts are in order, fitting in new wood is the easy part.  If the graft needs to look good, the hard part is finding replacement pieces, with matching grain and color, which is hit or miss depending on the results expected.  Sometimes it is a better Idea to cover up damage with an artistic inlay, because it looks better, and can add value to the instrument.

Binding:

Old world cellulose binding often needs repair, because it shrinks at a different rate than the wood it surrounds, and the glues used when it was first installed, may not hold it down anymore.  In some cases it just deteriorates, and may turn dry and brittle, or the opposite where it seems to get soft and sticky.  When better materials became available, cellulose was replaced with other plastics, and although they don't have the same problems, may still need work for other reasons.

As cellulose binding is hard to find, and is a terrible material to begin with, and it may be impossible to find exact matches for the many other plastics used for binding, it makes sense to either use what looks closest for small repairs, or replace all of it with what is currently available.  If complete replacement is in order, you may consider wood instead of plastic, as it is more aesthetically pleasing, especially on instruments that are not painted in color.

On Instruments that are lacquered in color, the hard part with these repairs is removal of the old binding, without messing up the line between the lacquer color and the binding itself.  It is standard manufacturing procedure to mask off the binding prior to painting, and more often than not, the paint overlaps the binding, making it hard to find where the wood ends, and the binding begins.  Because of these difficulty's, replacing binding properly can be very tedious and time consuming, and therefor also very expensive, and giving a close estimate before work begins is nearly impossible.  In some cases it is more cost effective to go with a new finish altogether, rather than trying to preserve an old one against all ods.