Jw Luthier Services

A Gibson F5-G mandolin re-fretted, cleaned and set-up for a nice low action. I wouldn't mind one of these for myself, it sounds good and plays with an easy light touch.

For some strange reason the lacquer finish on the neck of this guitar had not cured properly which made it feel sticky whilst being played & prone to marking very easily. It came in to have the neck stripped back to bare wood & to be re-finished with a clear matt lacquer. As an embellishment it was to have the face of the headstock finished in black gloss lacquer with a new Squier silver logo applied. I removed the neck from the body & took off all of the headstock hardware. ...A combination of scraping & sanding got the neck right back to bare wood ready for re-finishing. I sprayed it with 5 coats of sealer & then 10 coats of clear matt nitro-cellulose lacquer. That was left to cure for about 10 days before I masked it all off & sprayed the face of the headstock with 10 coats of black lacquer. Another 10 days later I carefully applied the new silver Squier logo to the surface. This was followed with a clear gloss lacquer. To achieve a nice flat surface over the logo without the edges of the transfer showing through took a total of 25 coats sanded every 5 coats. Then after yet another 10 days curing I was able to buff up the surface to a full gloss finish. I think the final result looks quite classy and the matt finish on the back of the neck feels extremely nice on the hand.
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Upgrading components is a popular request I get. This is one that I did quite a few months back. The owner had put together a Squier Stratocaster body with a beautiful feeling Fender neck. He then asked me to replace all of the Squier hardware with genuine Fender parts, fit a Gibson humbucker pick-up into the bridge position and upgrade the control pots & capacitors. It's not quite such a straightforward job as you would think as the fixing holes are slightly different betwe...en Squier and Fender parts. It meant plugging & re-drilling holes for the new Fender black pick-guard & the new Fender Vintage tremolo bridge assembly. The Fender Vintage style machine heads were a drop in & so that bit at least was easy. The Gibson 57 Classic Vintage humbucker fitted into the new pick-guard ok but required more clearance in the bottom of the body cavity which had to be routed out a bit deeper. CTS control pots & Sprague Orange Drop capacitors completed the electronics upgrade. A fret level/dress then a full set-up had it playing great. The parts costs amounted to a few hundred pounds but wow, it sure was worth it. And the sound from the Gibson 57 humbucker is just sublime.
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This tenor banjo hadn't been played for 75-years. It came out of the loft in a filthy & tarnished state. It was missing the bridge & 3 tuning pegs. I stripped it right down then cleaned & polished up every component. Much of the peghead top veneer was missing & so I put on a new piece of rosewood. All the frets were present but needed levelling, dressing & polishing. That was followed up with some new tuning pegs, new bridge & some light-gauge strings.... It has a lovely tone too. A young lady is now very pleased to be learning to play her great-grandfather's instrument that she has inherited.
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Whoops! a slight accident at school just before the next guitar lesson. All back together now plus the string action height lowered by a millimetre to make it nicer to play.

I like a project that challenges me & dusts off my brain cells. This 1970s Japanese Kasuga Mockingbird was one of those. The controls were not working properly & someone had tried unsuccessfully to re-wire it but had got a bit confused with some of the connections. It also should have had an active booster board but this had been left totally disconnected. At some time the original bridge had been removed & replaced with a Shift 2001 tremolo system. Because it is a copy of th...e BC Rich Mockingbird I was hoping that the circuitry may have been replicated too & my BC Rich wiring diagrams would help me out. This was not the case though so I had to work it all out myself. I started with the passive circuit & drafted out the wiring connections as per it arrived & used that to fathom out how it should have been wired up. I had to do quite a bit of re-wiring & sort out several badly soldered connections to get the passive circuit functioning. Next I studied the booster board & sketched out the circuit for that so that I could define the input, output & power connections. A bench test using a microphone & loudspeaker confirmed that it worked OK. I then wired it into the guitar so that the power was switched via the jack socket. Wow, what a powerful overdrive that board kicks in when you flick the switch! The rest of the instrument was given a fret dress & full set-up plus a new chickenhead selector knob for the varitone control. Great fun to play & a large array of sounds to be had from the rather complex controls. Shame I had to send it back to its owner.
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Here's a really nice PRS SE Custom that came in for it's initial set-up. As it was new it was surprising to find 4 high frets that had to be levelled. It also had some loose tuners & a loose output socket that required tightening. After that it was just a matter of setting it up to suit the owners preferences.

A new pick-guard was needed on this Squier Precision Bass. The only pick-guards available are for the Fender version. They are very similar but have some of the fixing holes in slightly different positions. That meant I had to plug some of the holes in the body & re-drill for the new positions. Not a problem but just a little bit of an inconvenience. It also had a failed volume pot which I replaced before completing the rest of the fret dress & set-up.

When a guitar suffers from 'bellying' it can cause the action height to increase considerably to a point where it is just too hard to play. This Fender 12-string JG-12CE was an extreme example of this problem. The pull of the strings raises the back of the bridge and pushes the front down, taking the guitar top with it. The cure involves removing the bridge & then flattening out the top with a special heated tool. In this particular case it took 2 heating sessions to get the top flat enough. The bridge was then re-seated & glued back in position. After repair & set-up the action height was reduced by over 1.5mm at the 12th fret & felt very comfortable to play.

The binding on this 30-year old Martin D-35P was coming adrift from the body due to adhesive failure. So I had to carefully glue it back in place before venturing onto the rest of the maintenance & set-up. These sound fantastic with a great bass end to the tone.

Not many people are familiar with the fact that Squier make other models than the Stratocaster & Telecaster. This is a Squier M77. Someone had painted the pick-ups in a vile red colour of a shade that absolutely clashed with the body colour. I was asked to clean it off & polish the pick-ups back to their original colour. I managed it OK on the neck pick-up but unfortunately the paint on the bridge pick-up had adhered right into the coil windings & had damaged it. Rather than re-wind the damaged one, it was cheaper & easier to replace the bridge pick-up with a Seymour Duncan JB model Trembucker. The remainder of the project was a straight-forward fret dress & set-up.

This is a Lanikai Tenor Ukulele which came in for a Belcat UK500-T pick-up & pre-amp retrofit. I checked & triple checked all my marking out before cutting the holes in the sides for the pre-amp & output/battery units. It all turned out successfully & sounded really good through my Marshall acoustic amplifier.

This is a Washburn X40-Pro. It took quite a bit of work to get it cleaned up & back to tip-top condition. I had to strip down the licensed Floyd-Rose bridge/tremolo unit to tighten the arm socket & replace a missing saddle clamp-block. It also required new cushioning in the body tremolo cavity because the original had deteriorated & disintegrated virtually to dust. The bolt-on neck was taken off so that the frets could be levelled & dressed. The tuners needed tightening down ...onto the head & the tuner tension screws adjusting. Once it was all reassembled I set it up with a lower action, adjusted the tremolo balance & intonation, then set the pick-up heights. With the Floyd-Rose & the locking nut it is great for some trem dive-bombing & returns right back to pitch.
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This has got to be one of the most attractive Gibson Les Pauls that I've seen. The sound & playability matches its good looks too. I gave it a fret dress & a set-up. Shame I had to give it back it was a real delight to play.

A good clean-up, full set-up & fret-dress was needed to get this Fender Telecaster back to how it should be. The neck-to-body angle required a slight adjustment & I dropped the action height by about 1mm. It feels really good now, & looks a lot cleaner!

Even brand new instruments can have problems. This Fender Pro Jazzmaster had some strange resonances when being played & also had something rattling about inside the control cavity. The resonances were due to the whammy spring not being set-up properly at the factory, and I also found some metal shavings inside the bridge post holes which was preventing it from seating soundly. Curing those made it sound a lot better ! The rattle from the cavity was a large blob of loose solder which had been dropped inside & not noticed in manufacture.

This is a lovely one to play & has a great sound. It's a Knaggs Steve Stevens. It only came in for a fret polish, re-string & intonation adjustment.

Here's an unusual but very interesting 6-string hand-made custom built bass by John Ambler. It's only a couple of months old, though deliberately aged to live up to its model name 'Junk Yard Solomon'. It has neck & bridge humbuckers with a mid single coil, plus an under saddle pick-up in the bridge. There is one output jack for the humbuckers, another for the single coil & under-saddle pick-ups. There's volume & tone controls on each output & selector switches for the pick-ups & coil taps. You will notice it also has a Bigsby style tremolo unit. This is superb build quality & the finish is tremendous. It had settled slightly over the couple of months since being built & so was brought in for me to perform a quick tweak to the set-up.