Help my tailpiece broke - Can I weld it???

constantine

what a week, first I burn 3 fingers then my tailpiece breaks! Can I weld it? I have gigs tommorow and the weekend

Bones

Not really. I doubt it would hold up.

New ones are pretty cheap. Djangobooks or Stewart MacDonald guitar shop supply. Other people may also have them locally in your area if you are lucky.

I hope you can get a back up guitar to get through your gigs.

B25Gib

Very thin metal in tailpiece, not suitable for welding or brazing. Call your local music store or musician's union for a rental/loaner guitar with high enough action so you can be comfortable with the gypsy rhythm and rest stroke. Good luck and try to use the gigs as a "learning experience"
Rocky

pinkgary

Gaffer tape!!!!!!!!

But seriously, how the hell did that happen?.... Just so i can put it on my list of things not to do with my guitar.

Bob Holo

I don't know how this particular one happened, but I know how some of them happen... Some guys do this tremolo thing... pressing either on the strings behind the bridge or directly on the tailpiece and it's a really bad thing to do for two reasons.

1.) Brass is not a springy material, so when you bend a tailpiece - even a little bit - you've just taken a little life out of it.

2.) An even more compelling reason to not do the tailpiece tremolo thing is that the average gypsy jazz guitar's bridge sees between 22 - 28 lbs of constant down-pressure depending on neck angle / action / string gauge / string type... pressing on the bridge or anything close to it is asking for trouble. A well built GJ guitar is meant to be "loaded" which is to say that - it is operating at or near what you might call its "rated load". (sure, some cheapie guitars are built really heavy, but in general most good sounding GJ guitars are built relatively light in the soundboard) So if you add 10+ lbs by pressing on the strings - you're now 30% over what the top was meant to bear. And if you think about the physics of inertia (as the tremolo is essentially a "bouncing" up and down on the strings with the hand) you start to see how you're risking damage to the instrument.

An old guitar player taught me how to get "wah wah" from a guitar in a non-destructive way. You put your forearm in front of the soundboard and rotate it like you're drawing circles on a blackboard. Odd as this sounds, it gives a pretty good wahwah. Experiment with it a bit and you'll get the hang of it.

constantine

thanks bob.

I never touch my tailpiece or the strings leading up to it from the bridge. I am thinking that my case was too tight and created pressure on the tailpiece every time I closed it (using non GJ case), or I wondered as well if a car trunk bracket could have pressed down on it due to bad placement. Either way, I will be way more careful with my tailpiece. I got it welded today and the welder said that it went well because the brass had a low amount of zinc in it, I guess more zinc means that it cant be welded for some scientific reason.