It is one of those stories when everything squeezes inside. You run towards the window and see how your favourite guitar flies out. And everything is in a slow-mo...
It's very practical thaf Framus makes their necks out of ovangkol wood — very dense, strong and hard wood, unlike mahogany Gibsons that look the same after falling off your sofa. The wood was able to prevent the fatal damage.
A client from another city sent us this neck for repairs not hoping that anything will turn out well. We did not want to make an epoxy-river table out of a headstock, so we just desided to make a new one.
The broken neck on a cnc table next to a future headstock.
Our journey starts from going to a stock of an exotic wood and searching for THAT piece of wood ina a big pile of ovangkol.
After that we order a set of natural pearl rectangles for the inlay making. You have to order more than you actually need to find the texture you want or that suits more.
That's how they arrive
After that we buy pieces of special cardboard and soak it into a special epoxy, turning it into the micarta material. INNOVATIVE SUPER-DUPER MATERIAL, GIVING YOU TONNS OF MOJO (с) (no, it's just paper and epoxy), which is used by magy guitar factories to make headstock veneers. The material made turns out to be cheap, reliable and is easily route on a cnc. The original Framus veneer is made the same way, so we follow the tradition.
After that the multi-hour process of creating a 3-d model of our headstock from a scratch. Of course there are no fitting models on the internet space - mostly because probably noone has ever made such a repair before.
3-d model of the headstock.
First we cut the veneet fo fit it to the original hedstock, than the model is corrected and fitted again. We made 3 attempts and almost ran out of micarta. Once the desirable accuracy is achieved, we can router out the headstock replacement itself. It's created "above" the veneer we fitted in 3d.
Veneer templates and a broken headsyock
The latest try was filled with pearl inlay. It's been cut out the same way on the cnc after 3-d fitting and hand-routed to fit perfectly.
Pearl inlay fitted into the veneer.
After that we set up the cnc and cut out the actual head replacement, making a wry face because of the sweet (not) ovangkol smell (actually smells like shit). We do double-sided routings every day, so this job wasn't so hard.
Doesn't look good yet. Sometimes it's better for you not to see what's happening behind our walls - for your mental health of course.
Work process and a failure clone headstock on the left.
We also copied the serial number, so the owner can track the story of the other side of guitar.
Almost a 100% clone
The veneer is glued to a hedstock
Disintegrating the dead part on the neck is the next step. We install the neck into a specially aligned setup and use a very smart routing program to keep the truss rod safe.
We router the neck in a special setup using a special set of engineering skills.
After that we fit the neck toa headstock, install the reinforcement steel rods inside the jointto prevent the sliding of the joint and glue everything together. It's very convinient that Framus makes compression truss rods so we can clamp the joint by tightening the truss rod.
That we use wwodworking tools and abrasives to shape out the joint and recreate the original profile.
The coloring and mixing follows - we mix multiple tones of wood stains, apply it and protects the pack of the neck with tru-oil and the front veneer with matt laquer. Of course you'd want more photos, but we were too excited with the process to make any.
The neck is ready
New bone nut
Did not color the serial for the better visibility.
Of course any good luthier will tel that there was a headstock repair, but the will be inpessed by the fact of the full headstock replacement.
This repair was extremely exciting for us an perfectly demonstrates the skills and capabilities of Easy Fix Workshop. Of course these kind of things cost a lot and take time, but the story behind is very valuable both for the customer whereas a combination of a cerative and engineering approach embodies our altitude to the repair and everything else we make.
