So, uh, a lot of you will think of this as frivolous . . . but I
need an acoustic guitar. I play guitar every day, and do all my singing and most of my writing on an acoustic.
So when I broke the truss rod in the fifty year old acoustic guitar that I had been playing for that last twenty years it was not a happy day. Called up the guitar shop to ask what they wanted to repair it, and they quoted me 800$ minimum . . . and they couldn't guarantee that the repair would take. This is a guitar that I bought for 200$ back in university, and I had pretty much worn the frets out on (fret job is usually around 300$). But I couldn't bring myself to just toss her in the garbage can. So then I did a lot of reading and figured out how to try to do the repair on my own.
You need to score around the binding with some box cutters, put a hot iron on the fretboard until it's uncomfortably warm to the touch, then start working a sharp thin blade between the neck and the fretboard. Once you've removed the fretboard, you can pull out and replace the truss rod. Then you need to sand off all the old glue on the board and neck, re-apply glue, and clamp it all back together.
So I spent several hours removing the fretboard, bought a new truss rod, pulled out the old one, put the new one in, sanded everything down, applied glue, and clamped it all back into place . . . only to find out the next morning that I hadn't clamped everything evenly enough and there was a small gap of about half a millimeter between the fretboard and the neck in a couple places. So, I heated up the iron and removed the fretboard again, sanded all the glue off, applied new glue again, and clamped it much harder . . . and the neck cracked when I was clamping things down tighter than before. Sadly, this was a bridge too far. Had to junk my baby.
Good thing was that I had increased my lutherie skills, and only really blown 20$ on a new truss rod. Major work on guitars is something that I've always been a little afraid of, but disasterous fuck up aside I was impressed that I got as far as I did. (I've since successfully refretted a guitars on my own - largely because I had gained some confidence from this.) Bad was that I had now wasted a lot of hours and destroyed my guitar. :(
Then to add insult to injury I couldn't find anything in a music store that sounded as good for under two grand. Obviously I wasn't going to get a new guitar. Ended up spending a couple months sifting through want ads and used stuff and eventually settled on a very nice sounding/playing acoustic in great condition for about a grand:
The new guitar is lovely and growing on me. But I'm still sad about my baby though. I've spent more of my life with her than with my wife.