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I would. A crack in that area can easily spread, with humidity changes or accidents. A pro repair will involve clamps, to hopefully line it back up. And thin CA glue to seal it up. Buying the clamps will likely exceed the cost of repair. A hack repair is to just soak it down with...

I'm seeing more bargains, lately. Asking prices are still crazy most of the time, but occasionally it looks like someone actually wants to sell.

Can anybody ID that guitar? It looks a lot like an Alvarez-Yairi Ritchie Blackmore signature--except that guitar has steel-string type headstock & tuners. It's an unusual layout, with F holes on a flat top and a cutaway. Cool guitar.

Most steel string acoustics come stock with 12s, these days. "Medium" acoustic strings means 13s. That guitar sounds like nylon strings to me, looks like it too. Nylons through an undersaddle piezo. I've got a set of D'Addario EJ45 classical strings here on my desk, 85.85 lbs tension for the...

And every duck-based cartoon character is a jerk.

Unlikely anyone would be stupid enough to devalue an EJ Strat by removing the identifying marks. It would have Fender part number stickers in the body routing. Much more likely this is an aftermarket body that didn't have the backplate holes drilled--or a straight up Chinese fake. And at best...

This sort of frequency sweep is as much about the equipment as it is about your ears. My laptop speakers start making sound at about 140Hz and stop at about 14000. My earbuds (they're the $5 kind) make a weird buzzing until about 60Hz, where it resolves into a note. And then I hear up to...

It's about the angles involved, which are kind of dependent on the thickness of the fretboard, the height of the nut, the distance between nut & tuner, the height of the tuners, and the angle of the headstock (if any). On my Strat the one with the lowest angle is the G string (no retainer on...

It would make a whole lot more sense to just move the switches within the box. That's a 10 minute job with no more tools than a screwdriver. Though in any case they still need to be labeled. Brown switches seem like an odd choice in a hospital setting. Those things could be covered with dirt...

If you are going to sell at some point, at this point, the most important thing is to avoid any change that makes it harder to authenticate. Absolutely don't touch the existing original finish in the cavities or any existing markings. Don't cover those up, don't change the routing. Beyond...

The bore holes they make provide an easy path for mold & fungus, which rot out the inside of the tree. Here's a couple pics of the damage they do, in this case to a Blue Ash from my yard, cut down in 2019. As you can see, even the heartwood has severe damage. Clean USA Ash with pretty...

Only if your house is built out of ash. Which is unlikely. Don't worry about the house. Do worry about any ash trees within 6-8 kilometers.

Fender announced they were winding down their Ash models back in April 2020. This is probably one of the last ones, and easy to see why. If you have ash trees in your country, I suggest you bag up the guitar and keep it sealed. You don't want this infestation.

Emerald Ash Borers killed a tree in my yard a few years ago. Hate 'em. If you don't already have those bugs, the guitar seller may have just introduced them. They are extremely prevalent in the United States, to the extent that clean Ash is hard to find. Kiln drying is supposed to kill the...

I've looked at this before, and been unable to come up with a solid answer or even a rule of thumb as to how long magnets last. What I did find is: Before Alnico, people used ferrous magnets that didn't last very long unless stored with a "keeper," a conductive strip that touches both ends of...

Can't rule out your hearing or your tastes changing, that happens to all of us. The pickups probably haven't changed at all. But pickups are only part of the total sound: the pots, caps, strings, and pickup position (including distance to the string) also play a role. And so does the amp...

I'm the short one.

The vintage guitar market is sadly full of fraud. We have seen variations of story before, the fraudster would always prefer to have an honest fool sell it for him. Or the fraudster would like to play the fool, and deflect blame back on the previous owner. I'm not making any accusations...

I'm into cars. My fun car is an 86 MR2, the "poor man's Ferrari." I'd sure love to try out the real thing, but I doubt if I would enjoy owning and maintaining one. And realistically, the classic Ferraris don't perform much better than anything modern. They can be beat off the line by...

Yep. Buy low, sell high--that's the way a market economy works. It's basically the same in every industry: raise prices until sales start to decline. That's how you figure out how much people are willing to pay. Maximize profits. Once upon a time people thought greed was shameful, so they...

Guitar safari is the correct answer. In person, one of them will look better, fit your hands better, or match the sounds in your head better. Try a bunch, only pay for the one you can't put down. Go without any expectation that the guitar you're looking for is in the first few shops you...

This is what happens when someone doesn't have any competition and doesn't care about their customers. In this case the only competition is 30 miles away. I bet it would cost you nearly $10 to drive to another store and come back--just in gas, not counting the value of your time and wear &...

Back in the day (pre-FMIC) all of the bodies were cut out with steel router templates and then the contours on the front and back of the guitar bodies were shaped freehand and sanded by hand. So they naturally varied widely. If some guitars were smaller, it's because somebody removed more wood...

Many things wrong, for this to be what is claimed. I'm not sure what it is, but it ain't that. The pots are aftermarket and were soldered by an amatuer.

It's nice to have a reading in cents. Not really necessary. Honestly it's not necessary to have intonation more precise than your everyday tuning. If you play around with a precise tuner, you'll likely find that some of your frets are a few cents sharp or flat even with the intonation set...