Official Luthiers Forum!

Not that anyone here would ever excrete... workmanship like the picture below but please, please don't ever do this....

If I did work like this I would consider falling on my LMI curved glue clearing chisel.....

But seriously the hack who did this did so in a professional capacity on a customer's brand new Yamaha likely destroying the K&K pick-up in the process. They also charged the customer for this mess......

It was brought to us because it has very little output from the pick-up. No wonder!

There is blue tape, super glue, putty and more in there. The transducers are on the wrong side of the pins and the cables will interfere with with a basic restring. One string is not even seated.

We've tried to remove K&K misplaced transducers prior and it's 50/50 if they will survive if they were super glued on. We use super glue too but go to great lengths to position the transducers in the right place in the first place.

Poor prior work which this is a rather unfortunate example of is a huge red flag for professional Luthiers. No one wants to get any of it on us.... It's walking into a dispute too and no one wants to do that. Some poor prior work such as the use of unserviceable glues like Gorilla glue will get an immediate decline from our shop. Sometimes we see a challenge and a client who sincerely needs someone to help them out.

Sheesh another customer heartbroken from poor prior work and another guitar messed up.

Very sad.

That's a shame!

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Wow, somebody had to work pretty hard to screw it up that bad.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Good one to try acetone in a syringe saturating the bridge plate around the transducers. Might just work.
Looks like a “custom” installation:)

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

Yikes! How does it sound?

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Looks like the only thing to do is "accept the demise" of the pickup, since it probably won't work when you get it out. Take it out, clean up the mess on the bridge plate and start over. Makes me kinda sad. The customer loses what he spent on that pickup, plus the prior labor, the cost of a new pickup, and the cost of labor for cleaning up the mess and the labor on the new installation.
Really bad day for the customer.
Or, cut his loses and play the Yamaha without a pickup.

UPDATE: So Dave Collins was able to carefully remove the transducers and save them, clean up the bridge plate and reinstall properly. The jack was installed wrong too and as such some cords would not even work in the jack. That was redone too.

How does it sound we were asked? That was the client's first clue they got screwed the volume was only around 10% of what it should be with a K&K. The balance was terrible too.

Not shown were the tuners that they installed, Grovers that were loose and only finger snug. The instrument had a film coating all over it that was not there when the client bought it new a few days ago. We think it might be WD40 sprayed from a distance.

A new nut was installed and I measured the gap that I like to get sub 0.001" at 0.032" on the high e. You could slice hard boiled eggs with this thing the action was so high.

It's all fixed up now and came out great. Used nearly 1/2 a roll of Bounty paper towels getting the film off the thing.

Guitars like that take all the fun out of the job

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Your customer is lucky to have you guys available to repair that fiasco

Yeah they do. I never met the client and likely would not have taken this in to work on it was so bad. But I was wrong and we could help and did help in a big way. Had I seen what was in the pic though I would have declined on the job. We did disclaim to the client that the transducers may be destroyed in the removal process and it's not on us if they were. Glad Dave is Dave and can do some pretty incredible things.

Thanks Craig I really appreciate that.

I'm VERY risk adverse having spent much of my life at GE with NASA hardware, medical devices and jet engines and nuclear power plants. When we messed up at GE someone could die. I forget sometimes that there is risk in nearly everything including the risk of failure and you have to take some of these risks.

So the lesson learned by me on this one is it is the hard jobs that you may not want that when they come out well can make your day. When they don't come out well they can hurt your business.... but you still have to try at times.

He’s lucky you guys took it in. He brought in a dumpster fire and now he’s got a guitar that will really work well for him.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

we all see these types of messes. My favorite is , I thought I could fix.

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

I almost wish you could post the name of the "tech" who screwed this up so badly, so nobody else ends up with the same nightmare.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

It was truly awful and there was more such as the jack installation was so hacked up that they had damaged the finish visibly around the jack too. The jack did not work well with some cords either since it was installed incorrectly and too far in the box. The strap button on the end of the jack was installed backwards.

With this said there was permanent damage to the brand new guitar.

Sigh... poor prior work is not uncommon in this business to encounter but this one took the cake.

This person's cardinal sin was not knowing when to stop and seek assistance.

I can tell you it was NOT a luthier or luthier shop it was a guitar store with a repair department.

That narrows it down, probably to one.....

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Measure Twice,

Karl Borum

Yeah, good ol' GC.

"Hey keyboard sales guy, can you install a K&K pickup?"

"Well, I never have, but I can give it a shot."

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

Well I'm not saying who did this and if I did I would be relying on the customer to have been truthful with us too so I'm not going there.

The point is though here is poor prior work that took a simple K&K install and turned it into a complex K&K removal, a possible K&K replacement had we not been able to save the transducers, finish damage on a new guitar and the customers time, gas, patience etc.

Pretty sad.

Yup. They may have been slow but at least they were rough.

FWIW - if you ever have to install the classical version on a high end instrument and don’t want to drill holes in the saddle slot, this might help. I’ve used it a few times over the years and it works great.

It indexes on the saddle slot via the fake ebony saddle. The plunger is where you put the transducer. The magnets line it all up.







In action:

https://youtu.be/lm4WVzHaujM?si=qz-nuUeAE7JA6Oer

https://youtu.be/7-WsBqGqQ_E?si=gTdtBEXA8UN4-IQC

Brad


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

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Slick.