The Saga of the Decapitated DiMauro

billyshakes

Jim,

You do fine work and your dedication to the craft is readily apparent. I, for one, am thankfully there are still people like you in this world.

Jazzaferri

IMO you should be bragging about it LOL.

Buco

jimkoz wrote: »

I just discovered this thread on my repair of Andrew's DiMauro. This one took a lot of planning. The finish on the DiMauro is thin and transparent, so any repair was going to be visible. The bowtie inlay seemed to be a good choice with great strength and good appearance. For those of you interested, here's a video of the repair I posted to Facebook.
https://facebook.com/jim.kozel/videos/10211816119057601/?l=7587651359011846813

Yeah, this is one of those videos/posts where I wish you could click triple thumbs up, Tivo style plus "insightful".

Andrew how many times did you cringe every time he mentioned "this guitar that was left in the trunk of a hot car for several hours"?

AndrewUlle

Buco wrote: »

Andrew how many times did you cringe every time he mentioned "this guitar that was left in the trunk of a hot car for several hours"?

I'm just glad he left out "the moron who left his guitar in the trunk" from the final edit.

Actually, it was an unplanned stop at a going out of business sale at a guitar shop...

AndrewUlle

Well, the DiMauro is back from the shop - hopefully permanently. Jim first completely disassembled the mystery repair. The three short dowels were ineffective at best.

These are out of order...

of course Jim has to replace the dowels even though they weren’t helping much...

A larger spruce bow tie with a screw...

Two lateral

Lango-Django

Andrew, we’ve all been that moron that left their guitar in the car trunk on a hot day.

Well, actually by “we” I mean more like “me”...

jonpowl

Is this a recent repair? I thought it was broken last year. Perhaps it is a repair of the last repair? Is it cost prohibitive to have a new neck made and installed? I'm sure there are a few guys around who could do that, Martin Tremblay comes to mind. Good luck!

AndrewUlle

This particular instance of repair was just completed in August (2019). A repaired was attempted last year but it just didn't hold up.

It was a particularly bead break, vertical across the grain such that the glue joint was essentially a butt joint with all kinds of leverage working against a very small gluing surface.

My luthier, Jim Kozel, disassembled the entire break, removed all the old glue & dowels from the original attempt at fixing (before I bought it). He then redid the repair from scratch, adding a lateral spline on each side of the break in addition to an enlarged bow tie spline on the back of the neck. The resulting Frankenstein neck seems a lot more stable - we shall see.

I did consult with Martin Tremblay, but we agreed that the repair plus shipping back and forth to Canada would be very expensive. I'm pretty sure it would not be worth having a custom built neck made and reset. These DiMauro Modele ****, while nice sounding, are not particularly valuable.

If this doesn't hold up, I'm done - it will become a decoration...

Scoredog

Thanks for sharing, quite interesting.

I had an ES335 break before guitar stands were popular. I was playing a show backing a few comics in Vegas including "The Unknown Comic" (kind of hope you don't remember him). Some Moron (guess who) leaned his guitar against the amp and watched it slide off the amp and onto the stage floor, broke in almost the identical place. Murray Langston (The actual Unknown Comic) asked if I could still pull off his zipper bit where he pretends to move his pants zipper and I make a scraping sound with the guitar, that was about the only thing it could do at that point...:)...Anyways, had it fixed, the luthier told me it would be stronger than ever. I eventually sold the guitar about 3 yrs later but found out it broke again a year later. Stronger than ever was not correct in this case but could have been the luthiers fault or maybe it is what it is.

Hope yours turns out better.

Lango-Django

It was about 1987 and my band, the Rainbow Gardens Orchestra was playing onstage at Toronto’s prestigious Roy Thompson Hall, home of the Toronto Symphony.

To be honest, our appearance there was just a tad less prestigious than the TSO’s, as our group had been booked there by a “barbershop quartet” convention.

Anyway, I had just bought a new metal guitar/banjo stand, and as we entertained the barbershoppers, everything seemed to be just fine....

..until suddenly, in the middle of a “guitar” song something must have happened to the new stand which was standing a few feet away from me onstage.. For no visible reason, my banjo suddenly did a bellyflop onto the stage floor, landing with a resounding WHAM!!!!

The audience of hundreds gasped to see the head get knocked right off the neck of the instrument and dangle uselessly on the floor.

The subsequent repair was successful for a few years but ultimately gave way again. i still have the instrument in my closet because I just can’t throw it away...