Univox Coily electric guitar repair

I picked this up for under $65 on that wonderful guitar cloud in the sky. It's a late 60's Univox "Coily" model, basically an ES-335 copy.

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(click for full size)

The pickups, bridge, and critical parts of the tailpiece are long gone. There's a bunch of wiring inside but no idea if it's any good. But really not too much wrong with it other than all the inlays are peeling up.

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First up, the refret. The frets are actually in decent shape but the block inlays needed a lot of work and you'll see below that pretty much means planing the fretboard.

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Defretting this neck was a real pain. Maybe they started making frets a little better or maybe it was glued in, but this was the first time I felt heating the frets was completely necessary. If it wasn't heated it wasn't going anywhere. Also the frets were seated so nicely that I couldn't get my fret pullers under then. Ended up prying one end up with a chisel to get it started. You can see some of the pain on the end of the raised fret below.

In between bouts with the frets I started working at the inlays. Most of them were a little loose on at least one corner. The original glue wasn't very good. It was brittle and chipped easily. I used a razor blade and a piece of guitar string to slowly get the gaps cleaned out.

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(click for full size)

Ah, much better. With everything cleaned out it's time to get enough glue in there to hold the inlay down. I'm using the glue part of the two-part Loctite superglue (glue + activator). The normal stuff has activator mixed in and does that white crusty thing and gets everywhere. Not what you want for this job. The glue flows into the crack and underneath nicely because superglue wicks really well. It isn't necessary to fill the cracks on the sides completely at this point, you need to make a 2nd pass anyways.

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And then I clamped them any way I could. Cable ties and a tiny block would probably work better.

Once the inlays are set then I went about filling the gaps. In most cases this took a couple passes. One thing I learned is that you want to minimize the amount of glue you get on the inlay. That way if part of the inlay is a tiny bit below the fretboard you won't have to plane so much of the fretboard away to get the glue off.

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After planing with 100 grit sandpaper. I usually start with 60 grit but the neck is perfectly straight to begin with and 60 grit can really put some deep grooves in inlays. It's a shame I had to plane this, the fretboard was in really good old condition. When I'm done it will be in really good new condition, not quite the same thing. If you're really careful with the glue you can get away with spot sanding. I've done this with fretboard dots but these big blocks just scream for a planing.

This is the one block that turned out perfect, a few others had tiny spots where they needed more glue (which I'm doing on the left). This one doesn't look so good in the picture but running my finger over it it's completely flush. When it's sanded down all the way to 600 grit that glue will be so polished you won't know it's there.

Sanded down to 400 grit and then worked on just the inlays with 600 and then 1500 grit to get them shining.

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(click for full size)

This turned out pretty nice all around. Sad to see that nice aged layer of rosewood gone but the newly exposed wood is really pretty. It's no brazilian rosewood but still, look at that grain! The inlays ought to stay put now until kingdom come.

I've been amassing parts for this project for a while. One of the problems was this guitar used odd sized pickups and they're hard to find. So I decided to convert it to humbucker-sized pickups. But I needed pickup rings to make that happen. I poked around a little and dropped a line to Dave at fretsonthenet.com. I ended up sending him a drawing.

And 3 weeks and $40 later I had new rings.

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(click for full size)

Now it's starting to look like a real guitar again. I'd been wanting to try the GFS pickups out for a while, and they are relatively cheap. The neck is a "Mean 90" humbucker-sized P90, the bridge is a "Dream 180".

I've been waiting to refret this neck for a month because the fret tang nipper I ordered from a seller on ebay was taking forever to show up. The seller disappeared so I started looking around and found someone using a cheap tool for this.

It's called a nibbling tool and it cost me all of $12 (beats the stew-mac $50 tool and it actually works great). They're used for cutting sheet metal kind of like a jigsaw is used on wood. I had to grind one edge down so that the fret could lay right while I nip it. I should have instead cut a groove in it (closeup here) so the fret would have a hard time slipping around, but it works. Sometimes I have to file a bit afterwards but it's very usable. WAY faster than the dremel tool I used on my mandolin.

Starting off with the nut. The neck on this guitar is on the thin side, so I didn't have a nut to copy the slots from. The calculations are trivial but measuring and cutting the slots is tricky. The frets.com guy has a tool for slot placement but I used a CAD program to draw up a slot template.

With this template it's pretty easy to tape the nut down (double sided tape is good for so many things!) and use a straight edge to project the slot lines onto the nut. Then get the old nut files out and go at it.

My nut is way too tall because I wanted to slot it and see if the spacing seemed right. If I didn't like it I could sand it down and re-slot it. But it seems about right. I was able to string it up and play a little slide on this last night. The neck pickup really kicks ass, I am kind of surprised. Not yet sold on the bridge pup.

I got some nice big fret nippers from Stew-Mac. I'd been using wire cutters to trim the fret ends but it kills my hands. This is much better. I noticed a few frets sticking up a little bit...

... not any more they're not! That's my new neck caul. I need to mount it to something taller for it to be of any use, but it is handy for clamping operations.

I was getting ready to level the frets and noticed this. It seems to be a little back bow. It's probably fine, but I wanted to tighten up the truss rod to see if I could get the frets really level. But I can't find an allen wrench that would fit :(. I've tried 7/32" (too big), 3/16" (too small), and 5mm (too small). You'd think it'd be a metric size since it's a Japanese guitar.

Well I did get the truss rod turning. I had to sacrifice a 7/32" allen wrench and file it down to fit just right. That helped with the neck bow. Anywho, I leveled the frets and found out they weren't as evenly installed as they could have been.

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That one fret was a real b****. You can see how flat part of it is. There were a couple other spots that had some buzzes but another pass of leveling cleared that all up. It helps to set the action really low to find those spots.

I haven't quite perfected my fretting skills. The fret ends are a bit ugly (though functional) and like the one above there's some really flat places...

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... but you really can't tell without looking really hard, and everything feels fine.

I used a "vintage bone" blank from Stew-Mac, it's just unbleached bone. It looked really ugly to begin with (brownish, splotchy) but now that it's polished it looks great. One thing I learned is you don't want your nut blank any taller than it needs to be. When I cut the slots they tend to walk a little. The deeper the slot the more it can be off.

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