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Posts: 2879
Joined: Jan. 30 2007
From: London (the South of it), England
broken plate
I'm realllllly slowly trying to build a second guitar. a while back I glued the plates of the soundboard successfully. Then it got left for ages. I then moved house and it got damaged. it basically split down the grain about 50 mill from the original glued join.
question is. Can i just glue that clean split and join? or should I plane them clean like i would when joining them normally? or should I just ditch and start again with new plates?
I’d be inclined to separate the top, plane the plates clean, and rejoin. It might be a good idea to give the separated plates a flex and a few good taps to see if whatever caused the crack also caused any other cracks that aren't as readily apparent. The taps will often make a buzzing sound if there’s a crack present.
If you have a large enough top plate then trim it off and glue the top together again. If you are a little concerned about gluing, then contact a guitar maker to help you through the process.
If that means start from scratch with a smaller plate
That’s what I meant. If the crack is only 1.25mm (50 mil) from the join, then separate and plane both plates to create a new bookmatch and then rejoin.
In *theory* you should be able to just reglue it along the split. But in practice, especially if any significant amount of time has passed, there is quite likely to be something like stray wood fibers, dirt, other damage, or just wood moving and changing that make that not practical. I would go with RobF and Tom's advice.
Ahhh. I interpreted 50 mil to mean 0.050” or ~1.25mm.
Maybe post a picture of the top? It might not be so bad, and if this is a lockdown project then there’s no harm in trying to salvage it. There will be plenty of opportunity for obtaining pristine tops (for other guitars) down the road, and working on a new guitar now might do wonders for the spirits.
Lol. Even if you decide to scrap the top, it doesn’t have to go in the bin. The wood can be used for bridge and soundhole patches and the like. Often when I buy tops I’ll ask for some orphan slices for that purpose. The rosette can be salvaged, too.
I have a “Box of Shame” containing a few heads sawed off from their necks and a heel that went bad, but the rest of the necks got repurposed as back braces and the reinforcing rods salvaged and reused. So, in guitar making, all is never truly lost. Thankfully, the box isn’t that big, either, lol.
And where I got the idea for the box...
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