Here's that Martin again

 Neighbour Kier came round the other day, with a broken Martin:

Nothing too disastrous, just an open top joint in the lower bout:

You can see it here. The x-brace is loose too:

Here, I’ve got the joint held open with wedges while I glue it up.

The usual spool clamps do the business on the rib, while the cam clamp takes care of the x-brace:

Following clean up of the top, a strange creak revealed more damage. The opposite end of the x-brace is also loose:

That's a bit of a fiddle to fix, but with a 'spoon' made from bent wire and wielded through the sound hole with a torch and a dental mirror, it was soon glued and clamped up.

Another fall

Another guitar appeared this month, attached to a sad looking chap concerned about the health of his daily player. "The sounds is not coming out" he said, as he explained how it had landed on the kitchen floor with a sickening crunch.

No wonder. The back to rib joint of this Martin OO-X1 Java has opened from upper bout to lower, fortunately quite cleanly:

No matter though - it's an easy fix. After a practice run with the spool clamps, we can open the joint with some wedges and introduce some Titebond:

One glued up all the way along, we can align the back and rib and clamp up, cleaning off squeeze out as we go along:

After a couple of days, we can release the clamps and clean off any more glue. Fortunately these guitars don't have any binding, so we just tidy any marks in the joint with a little matt black acrylic to match the original finish on the bevelled edges.