Guitar Neck Repair Is My Neck Stripped Or The Body?

Quick fix for wobbly bolts.

A loose neck will drive yous crazy! Here'southward a simple fix. The screws holding this neck are losing their grip. I'll bet this has happened to you, too...

Some of the screws property this bolt-on neck have become too loose.

1's even ready to fall correct out. These screwholes are stripped, or maybe they were drilled too big in the offset place.

To repair this, you could:

Drill out the stripped holes
Fill them with wooden plugs
Drill new holes

That'south a certain-fire solution, merely here'due south the easy way: get the screwholes working again by hardening them with super gum.

The pigsty on the left yet has decent threads in the wood, so a quick glaze of #10 h2o-thin super glue will harden and preserve those threads.

The hole on the right is really stripped: at that place's very little thread left in the wood. It'southward probably neat enough to have to be filled and re-drilled, only it may require several coats of super gum. For really stripped holes similar this, a thicker mucilage will help: after the #10 soaks into the woods, a 2nd coat of medium-viscosity #20 volition lay on thicker, giving this screwhole new life.

Allow'due south get started!

Blow or vacuum the dust out of the holes, so use a Q-tip to apply paste wax to the finish around them. This protects against an accidental glue spill. Be careful not to become wax in the holes.

Apply #10 super glue with a whip tip applicator to aim the glue downwards into the hole. If the pigsty's badly stripped, employ plenty of mucilage and let it soak in for x or 15 seconds (yous'll siphon out any excess glue in the next step).

Swirl the applicator tip to glaze the sides of the hole; yous needn't fill the hole with glue.

Hot Tip: a glue drip cup

Before you lot kickoff gluing, brand yourself a glue drip cup (it'll come in handy in a minute).

Drill a 3/sixteen" hole in the lesser of a stain mixing loving cup. I suggest a brad indicate drill bit because brad points cut clean and they don't hog into the plastic the way twist drills do.

Poke a pipette through the pigsty in the mixing cup and suck the gum out of the screwhole. Lifting the pipette tip upward into the cup, y'all can deposit the mucilage. I do this cup trick because h2o-thin mucilage runs freely from a pipette, and hands squirts out when and where you lot don't want information technology to. Working through the drip cup is safe and clean, lets yous concentrate on removing the glue fast, and gives you lot a place to hold the super glue for squirting into the other screwholes. (Don't put the used glue dorsum into the bottle with the clean glue.)

Drying Fourth dimension:

Let the holes dry for nigh 20 minutes. Most holes won't need more gum, but nearly-stripped holes should become a second coat.

Check information technology out!

Developed in our shop, the Notched Straightedge is the most versatile tool always for evaluating necks. The notches fit over the frets, reading the straightness of the fingerboard itself without interference from worn frets. Information technology even works with the strings on. Or lift it upwardly onto the frets as a precision straightedge for fret leveling.

Subsequently the 20 minute drying time, apply some super glue accelerator to the holes to be certain they aren't moisture with glue.

Larn from my mistake!

A pipe cleaner would have been a much better applicator than what yous see me using here! I pulled the pump sprayer tube out of the accelerator canteen and dabbed information technology on the glue to harden it. Information technology worked corking, but of form mucilage hardened on the accelerator tube and clogged the pump. I should have known better. Employ a pipe cleaner or toothpick instead!

Remove the paste wax with a soft rag dampened with naphtha.

When the mounting screws go back in the holes, they'll re-cutting the threads nicely in the gum-hardened wood. In the background of this photo is an old beeswax candle I keep in my shop: I scraped the screw threads on the wax every bit a dry out lubricant to make them screw in easily.