Just bought my first ever acoustic guitar (a Taylor Big Baby) used on a local craiglist-equivalent for about 130$. It came in the original gigback which had only one back strap left. I decided to bike home and strap the guitar crosswise on my back… in hindsight I should have realised that the one strap could not be trusted. Anyway I biked for about 3m before the strao broke off completely and the guitar fell on the asphalt. Upon arriving home I found the damage you can see in the picture :( The tuning peg of the G string was very crooked, I pressed it back in shape and for the moment it seems relatively stable…
What do you think I should do? try to glue the piece together myself? get it done professionally? try to get a replacement headstock? thanks for any advice and condolences!
thanks, that‘s very good to hear! these go for about 470$ where I live so I think I‘ll bring it to a shop and get a quote
Homie that crack isn’t all the way through.
This is a simple fix. You can DIY.
Remove strings. Remove the hardware for your D string (assuming this isn’t a lefty model).
Carefully pipe in some wood glue. Get it everywhere but not too much.
Clamp it with whatever you got. Gotta be sturdy though. 100 rubber bands would work. So would wedging it in your damn toilet seat with enough weight on it.
Clean off excess glue
Let the glue set over night.
Reattach that tuning hardware.
Restring. You done. It fixed.
That’ll be $200 for the glue and the rubber bands, plz
Edit: added emphasis on wood glue. do t use Krazy Glue or any other Super glue. Super glue and wood glue are totally different products. This is an incredibly important distinction to make for a fix like this.
Edit 2: please DO NOT USE TITEBOND as the person below suggests.
You WILL fuck up your axe.
Piping in the glue. Like how? Syringe?
Yeah buddy.
There’s other ways but this would be the more professional way lol.
Buying some with needle that’s roughly 1-2mm on diameter is relatively easy and it does not even need to be meant for glue (depending on what glue you use of course)
This. But I’d use hide glue and then after filling the crack with the glue, use a suction cup to pull it through both sides
Wood glue === hide glue
Traditionally, anyways.
Edit: this relationship is actually interesting and complex.
PVA is more commonly known as wood glue nowadays. But hide and PVA are both commonly used.
There are also liquid hide glues that are marketed as wood glue.
It’s a messy relationship these days lol. I just looked into it!
There’s variants and subvariants too. There’s fish glue, which is close to hide glue. There’s also waterproof versions of PVA glues. Not to mention PU glues and epoxies. Though, besides PVA and hide and fish, the rest are rarely used for guitars. But traditionally, only hide glue is acceptable. Not really rightfully so IMO, but it is what it is.
I thought I knew a lot about glue through lutherie.
🤯
Use titebond 1
Absolutely not.
Titebond expands. Hide glue/wood glue draws the wood fibers together…
In this instance we want our adhesive to draw our wood fibers together.
There is no more amateur mistake you could make than using krazy glue, tite bond, or any other polyurethane-based adhesive, in a situation such as this.
This point will be drilled into your head should you ever study guitar repair under a Luthier. There are two kinds of glues, and two gluing situations.
Edit: you can downvote if you want I’m literally making a repair like this ~10 times a year for a Luthier.
You’re dead wrong. And you’ll fuck up a guitar.
Even Taylor guitars uses titebond. I used titebond 1 on my neck thru builds and they’re fine.
You’re confidently incorrect.
And annoying as fuck.
This is where I block you.
lol. The irony in that statement is palpable
plays my titebond glued guitar
I also should have noted I fixed this exact same issue with hide glue, hence why I recommended it. It’s not hard to find and will do the job correctly, like @foggy said
Some liquid hide glues are marketed as wood glue. That’s what I was referring to when Id said wood and hide glue are the same. We were referring to the same thing. They’re not always the same thing though.
It’s confusing.
But you could use any wood glue, you should use hide glue, some wood glue is hide glue.
In my world, hide glue and wood glue are the same thing. In a proper carpenter’s world, that is not the case. I only work on guitars/ukuleles
Gotcha. Semantics lol. My understanding is if two pieces of wood used to be the same piece of wood (crack or break repair) use hide glue. If they’ve always been different pieces of wood to use titebond/pva wood glue.
That is what the luthier I studied with taught me as well.
Sometimes, if the two pieces of wood don’t fit back together well enough, your unfortunate option is to sand them both down and use polyurethane. Which is why I would heavily advise against breaking the piece off! It’s already snug! :)