Repairing Josh's Guitar, Part 1.

I have a friend named Josh.  He's a great guy, but sometimes doesn't make the best decisions.  Case in point, he was doing something not so smart and broke the neck on his Dean acoustic guitar.  Well, that means it's time for to work my magic.  I mean, I fret dressed and set up that guitar to actually make it playable in the first place.  So my goal is to make it at least 95% of what it was. 

Luckily, I took pictures.  Here's what the guitar looked like with giant cracks in it.

So yeah, that's not pretty.  But that's not the only thing.  When the guitar hit the concrete it also scratched up the back.  Here's some pictures of it.

All those white marks are scratches.  It looks like I have my work cut out for me.

First up, I loosened the truss rod, and saw that the wood wanted to lay flat together.  I then loaded as much Titebond 2 wood glue as I could into the various cracks.  Next, I used my old timey clamps to clamp it together.

Here's the pictures of the clamping.

I have the one clamp angled like that to hold one of the splintered ends in, so it could glue up. 

I then let the glue have 48 hours to dry.  I always give Titebond 2 48 hours to dry.  So this is what it looked like after I took off the clamps.

Despite being somewhat jagged, the wood glued together pretty good.  Luckily there is a neat trick I know about working on overseas Dean guitars.  They are actually sprayed with a polyester spray, not polyurethane.  That means you can lay into them on a buffing wheel.  So I took the neck of the guitar and put it on the buffing wheel to knock down the edges.

Next I started sanding out the high edges.  Here's the pics.

As you can see, I taped off the parts I didn't want to get scratched.  I then took a block sander and smoothed down any high spots.  I then took it back to the buffer.

However, I not only buffed the neck, but the body as well.  Remember those scratches on the back of the guitar?  Well, I took them to the buffer as well.

First up, here's the neck after the 2nd buffing.

And here are the pictures of the body.

Not only was I able to get those scratches out, I was able to get a few other ones out as well.  I also smoothed up a few places that couldn't be seen on camera, but could be seen by the naked eye. 

Next it was time to start making the neck look nice.  First up was adding stain to it.  This is what it looked like after the stain.

And then I started adding a Wipe On Poly.  This is only the first coat, but look at the outcome!

I've been working on guitars for a while, but this is the best I have ever done on a repaired neck.  I guess practice makes perfect.  But I've gotta say, this one presented me with a good challenge.  It's not over.  I still need to build up layers of poly, make a bone nut, and set her up again.  Wait until Part 2.  It may look like a whole new guitar.