H73 repairs - by François

François : I already had a H420 bass damaged from transport, see the other page in this kamikazie section.

This H73 Roy Smeck was damaged more or less for the same reason : not enough padding in the packaging under the lower bout. Result : the endpin was pushed inside, crushing the wood around and unglueing / moving the end block inside.

(As you can see, the jack area also was damaged and repaired in the past, by a previous owner).

I re-used the "extractor" tool that I made for the H420 (and I will use it later on some deep bodies too.. I have a Monterey to fix the same way..). This allow me to pull from the inside the endblock back in place, like reversing the crush-in movement...

Below I'm glueing only the side of the endblock and all the small tongues of wood together. I applied titebond white glue as well as I could in every spaces before pushing the wood with these small rods. See the cork spacers ? (on the dark side).. They act as "springs" to hold the rods in place. I had to cut the rods just the right length, to be able to push them in place, from a diagonal to an almost perpendicular position.. Am I clear ? When I was done, there was four of these small wooden rods, each pushing its own part of wood back in place.

Below the celluloid sheet helps me to reach inside the body, to apply glue between the body and the endblock. You can see it in action, the photo was taken through the vibrato hole but I hold the tool with my hand through the bass f-hole.

Unfortunately I did not take any photo of the next step : clamping the body in the endblock area. No big mystery, but to give an idea I re-use this photo from the other H420 repair :

Then, I wanted to add strength to the fixation of the vibrato, as I did for the H420 bridge. It's difficult to be confident to the original screws in the rather cheap laminated wood (though experience prove they usually hold it well)...

Anyway, I cut two small wood plates in a heavy duty laminate, and glued them under the top, just under the screw's holes. Below, one is already clamped inside, and one is shown outside. You can see holes already made in the small plate, and the purple electric string (two of them), with a knot at the end, is used to pull it exactly at the right place under the original holes.

Below, if you're curious, here is the original bridge of this late H73, including the dreaded sticker... It works great anyway :-)

Finish is not my cup of tea, and I don't have the right red nitro anyway, so I leave it as is for now... To me most important was to be able to string it to pitch and twang !

Are they not cute ?

fanfab4 : Again another great kamikaze job :-)

Billieg2 : Good job! Thanks for all the info. and great pics :-)

Auger : Thanks again Francois for another well documented repair.
So that roller bridge works fine on that guitar eh? I may look into trying one on one of my guitars as the original wooden with a plastic saddle type are getting so expensive.