For those of you who don’t know, Michael has played with any number of greats, but is probably best known for playing electric bass for Miles Davis.

Here he is playing the Jim Fleeting Michael Henderson Starship Bass.

For all the techies out there, here’s the specs:

Body – Ebony top, swamp ash body, quilted maple back

Neck – Seven piece Maple and Purpleheart, Ebony headcap, quilted maple rear headcap

Hipshot Ultralite tuners, ABM bridge

Delano Hybrid Pickup, with J neck pickup.  Delano 2-band EQ.

I add this photo in to illustrate that sometimes a Luthier spends days on end finish sanding and polishing and buffing, but sometimes he has to hang out with his heroes and go to great gigs.  It’s a tough life

I always have a Les Paul headstock reglue in (see the reason why in my previous post).  I have three in various states at the moment, two Gibsons and an ESP.  I have just finished this brand new Gibson.

This is the before Picture.  As you can see, a complete break, with a fair amount of wood missing, so some filling required.

And here’s the after shots.  Good as new.  Another happy customer.

70′s Gibson Hummingbird needed a brace re-glueing.

Another Gretsch Anniversary.

I love the colour of this modern Rickenbacker.

A 1950′s Martin 000-18.  Just a setup required on this one.

Taylor 555 12 string bridge reglue.

Of course, once these guitars are fixed, I need to test them.  It’s a hard life, isn’t it?

The neck on this Gretsch Anniversary has moved to the point where it is no longer possible to play, because the action is too high, but there is no break angle over the bridge, which has been filed down so it is incredibly low.

Removing the neck from a guitar is fairly major surgery, but is sometimes the only way that you can return the guitar to a playable condition.

Firstly I remove the pickups, so I can have a look inside the guitar at the neck joint.  It’s hard to know what’s going on in there, but it’s important to have a look at any part of it that you can see, just to make sure that nothing unexpected has happened to the guitar.  I wasn’t expecting those junction boxes on the pickup wires, but that’s pretty irrelevant to this repair.  I’ll remove all the electronics, so they don’t get in the way or get damaged while removing the neck.

The neck has clearly been removed before.  It’s a mess.  And the heel has been repainted a light green, which not only doesn’t match, but is flaking off.

Gretsch necks are often bolted on, then the bolt is covered in Polyfilla and painted.  The heel had been repainted after its last reset.  I had to dig the Polyfilla out so that I could remove the screw.

I checked the fingerboard, as I wanted to see if there had been any evidence of the neck having been steamed off on a previous occasion.  This little hole beneath the 14th fret was along the lines of what I was looking for – except it was beneath the wrong fret!

This was more like it.  I removed the 15th fret and drilled two holes down into the dovetail joint.  One for steam to go in; one for it to come out.

I used this string to check to see if the holes had gone into the pocket of the joint.

Next I used a little espresso machine to pump steam into the neck joint.  The heat and water loosened the glue and allowed me to take the neck off.

This neck just fell right out.  It was relying on its bolt to hold it in place.  The heelcap just fell off, too. I guess it wasn’t glued on too well after the last reset.

Once I’d set the new angle in the neck, I glued it back in and screwed the bolt back in.  Although it pains me to do it, I have to put polyfilla back in the void.  It’s what I expected in there, and it’s what the next repairman would expect to be there, too.

Next I glued the heelcap back on, and blended the paint over the screw hole.  The neck was like a rainbow, so it was hard to know which part of the neck with which to blend the colour, but it looks authentic.  It’s important not to make it look brand new, or it will look daft against the scuffed up scruffiness of the rest of the guitar.

As you can see, the new break angle is much more satisfactory.

It’s all back together and playing like a dream.

I had taken in a Martin Eric Clapton signature model (picture posed by model, left), and the lacquer was separating all along the back of the neck.  Because it was a nitrocellulose lacquer finish, I was able to repair this, and have no evidence marks where I had thinned and added laquer to the original finish.

The post just came today, and I noticed something that looked suspiciously unlike a bill.  I opened it, and it was a card, with a picture of a tree on the front.  I read the message, and this is what it said:

Dear Jim,

A word of thanks for the superb work you did on the Fender and the Martin.

You’ve completely solved the niggly intonation problems I was having with the Fender and it’s a joy to play again.

As for the Martin – we’re staggered at the flawless finish on the neck.  To be able to not feel the previous abrasions was great, but not to be able to see the joins (as it were!) is a bonus.  The Waverley tuners have increased the tuning accuracy no end – I wish I’d have had it done years ago.  The upshot of all this is that I’m playing more than I’ve done for years!  Thank you.

The owner was delighted with the job when he picked it up, and has sinced phoned me to tell me how pleased he was with the new tuners I installed.  For him to go to this extra effort is what my job is all about.

I am in such a good mood that I am now going to put the binding on a cutaway.  This is an fiddly job, but this letter has given me the ego boost I needed to get cracking on it.

Expect a bad mood again in 1 hour’s time.

The reason why I am a bass player and a luthier goes all the way back to when I was 13.  My parents had just got Sky, and I was flicking through to MTV.  The channel was showing a European festival, possibly Rock Am Ring; the first thing I saw was Les Claypool, eight finger-tapping a solo in “Tommy the Cat”.

Now I knew nothing of guitars at the time, but I was astounded.  I turned to my friend Knuckles – who played guitar astonishingly well even back then – and asked, “What’s that he’s playing?”

Knuckles replied: “It can’t be a guitar, because there’s the guitarist behind him. It has strings, but no frets, so I guess it must be a six string fretless bass.”

“Well, I guess I’m just going to have to play six string fretless bass”.

And I do.  What this has to do with my luthiery is that Les was playing his Rainbow Bass.  A stunning piece of work by Carl Thompson. Some years later, as I put down a £1000 deposit to have a six string fretless made by Carl (already owning the Ken Smith shown in the picture) I realised that I had better start making them, because this hobby was getting too expensive.

I digress.  A customer brought in a six string for me to defret, which I am always delighted to do.

First, I remove the frets.  Gently does it: I don’t want to chip the fingerboard.  The gaps aren’t going to be covered up with new frets, so special care is required.

Here you can see that the frets have all been removed, without any issues.

Now I insert ash veneer, the same thickness as the fret slot.

Here the veneer has been scraped and sanded flush.

Then I sand my customer’s fretboard, using 1200 grit sandpaper, and polish it with lemon oil.

Nearly done.  Lastly, because there are no longer any frets, the nut is too high. So I file down the slots and set up the bass, to give it the really low action that fretless players like.

Obligatory “down the neck” shot.

Now the customer has a real instrument.  First thing I do when I play I six string fretless is play the intro to “Fish On” by Primus.  It’s my favourite bit of bass playing.  I still can’t make it sound quite like Les, though.

Then again, here’s a clip of Les playing it live and making so many mistakes (be warned, genteel reader: he does use an expletive at one point).  It reminds us all that we’re all human.

Martin Guitar Soundhole Rosette

This is a Martin rosette. It’s an example of what you may find on many guitars, with a few rings surrounding the soundhole.

Spanish guitar rosettes tend to be more elaborate, with beautiful marquetry patterns. You almost never see this on a steel string.

Baroque guitars were extremely elaborate, with three dimensonal “roses” going into and covering the soundhole.

This rosette is the work of Master Inlayer Larry Robinson, and appears on the 750,000th Martin. Check out the 1,000,000th Martin for more of his stunning rosette and inlay work.

Here at Jim Fleeting Guitars my simple hardwood rosette, with a couple of rings around it, is very fashionable. However I have decided that there is so much more that can be done.

I spent a week with Ervin Somogyi in Oakland, California. Ervin’s guitars all show his high level of skill, and his wonderful eye for design.

His interrupted rosette idea really struck a chord, and I decided to try a mix between the simple hardwood rosette and this interrupted design. This rosette is bolivian rosewood with a little of the sapwood showing, matching the headstock, back and sides.

This is what I came up with. It has inlaid mango, again to match the back and sides, and the Jim Fleeting Guitars’ ‘F’ logo.

This is my latest creation. The top hasn’t been cut out yet, but you can see the drawing of the shape of the guitar on the spruce. I put a fingerboard on there, to get the look of it. I am obsessed with the Art Deco designs from the twenties and thirties (probably because of their use of exotic woods) and I think this really shows that style. What do you think?

With more than two million views of his YouTube video, it would seem that musician Dave Carroll has finally persuaded United Airlines to listen to his complaint.  They have arranged a meeting with him.  I guess it’s because he has the sequel to this song in production, and a third in the planning stage.

The serious point of this is that since September 2001, most airlines won’t allow you to take a guitar case into the cabin of an aircraft.  They insist that you check it.  This is a frightening prospect.  The important thing is to make sure that your guitar can’t move in its case. It is the headstock hitting the end of the case as it goes down the chutes that causes it to snap off.  If you pad that at the shoulders, then the guitar can’t move.

However, if it is thrown or dropped so that the case is crushed and the guitar damaged, there is little preventative action that can be taken. Remember though: I can glue headstocks  for a modest fee, and can undertake any number of structural and cosmetic guitar repairs.

Do your worst, United: I’ll get the guitars back up and running.

I replaced the skin with a goat skin vellum. This is a difficult procedure, which involves wetting the skin and trimming it to size.

Once I’d tidied the frets and set up the banjo, it really began to sing.

On collection, the owner brought along some photos of her father, the banjo’s original owner.  She was also kind enough to allow me to scan them and include them in this blog.  His name was George Rusby.

George is fifth from the left on the back row.  I think these photos are great.  It makes me want to throw on some spats and dance the Charleston (or at least curl up with a good P.G. Wodehouse novel).

I was at a trade show a couple of years ago, and there was a stand there run by Madinter.  Madinter is a Spanish Luthier supplies company.  Unsurprisingly, it specialises in Spanish guitars, but when it comes to wood, it’s much the same.  A piece of ebony for a fingerboard is just the same, regardless of the guitar.  They have some electric wood, too.  I like the fact that it is a little cheaper, and I don’t mind that the wood comes fairly unprepared.  I can’t mill logs, but I can turn a rough plank into a slotted and radiused fingerboard, so I don’t need to pay someone else to do that for me.

At this trade show, Madinter were giving away packets of seeds.  These seeds were for Cypress, a wood commonly used in the construction of Flamenco Guitars.  The packet had the following statement on it:

With just one cypress tree we can make a hundred guitars.  With a hundred guitars we can plant one hundred trees.

I really liked the sentiment so, once I had settled into my new house, I planted the seeds and waited for them to germinate.  They are growing fast now, and I re-potted them at the weekend.  Four saplings are shooting up.

I think it will be an amazing experience to grow a tree from seed, and build guitars from it. And I figure I’ve got a couple of decades to learn how to make a Spanish heel before my guitars are ready to harvest…

Image credit: Bill Ward’s Brickpile.