The bridge pickup was also dead from either over tightening it downwards, thus bending the bobbin and tearing the fine winding, or from corrosion from sitting so long. I sent it out to Lindy Fralin in Virginia for a proper re-wind. I like that they always ask for the ohm reading on the other pickup so they can wind it as close to original spec as possible. It really shows their commitment to authenticity.

While the pickup was out of the shop I adjusted the truss rod straight, leveled the problem frets, re-crowned them, and buffed them to a nice high gloss.The tarnish on the chrome hardware was easily cleaned up with some fine metal polish.

Before installing the re-wound pickup, I added some new foam under the pickup to bring it back up to the proper height under the strings. The old foam was totally hard and deteriorated. I sprayed the potentiometers with de-oxit and wired up the pickup.

I then strung up the bass with the original flat wound strings. Check out the awesome green silk! They sounded full and deep and intonated surprisingly well for being so old. The pickup re-wind came out great as well. The bass has a new life ahead of it, no longer relegated to furniture status.

Here’s The One Am Radio’s song “Accidents” from the new movie Save the Date. Hrishikesh Hirway is the lead singer and primary songwriter of The One AM Radio, and his Healy guitar gets a little screen time here. It’s the first set neck mahogany guitar that I made, with a Lollar P-90 in the neck position. He also scored the music to the film. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing and hearing it all. Might as well head over to their Bandcamp page if you like the song!

I stripped the finish off the back of the neck and sprayed vintage amber lacquer over the heel and headstock to give it a warmer vintage hue to mimic aging. A final clear coat over the whole neck sealed the raw wood on the back of the neck. After the lacquer dried I used 0000 steel wool to give the back of the neck a nice satin feel.

He should wear through the lacquer pretty quick in highly played areas giving it a truly worn in vibe.

The string spacing and string height was all out of whack at both the bridge and the nut, making it almost impossible to play with a slide. There were various pieces of shim material keeping the strings at the right height, but they really hurt the string tone. Also, the customer wanted his Melobar to have 7 strings instead of the original 10. You can see there were even more slots than that in the nut and bridge. Perhaps someone tried to even out the spacing back in the day.

Both the nut and the bridge are made of aluminum so I started by leveling them out, eliminating the old string slots. Once I had a nice flat surface sanded to 800 grit, I laid out some lines for the new slots with my STEW MAC slotting ruler and filed guide notches which I would open up later for the proper string gauge. When laying out the strings I was careful to space them wide enough at the bridge for comfortable picking with bulky fingerpicks, and made sure they laid nicely over the pickups.

With the strings back on I filed the slots level, tuned up to pitch, and got out the slide. The Melobar now has a great clear tone with level strings making it much easier to play slide on.

I first laid out the two outside E strings, locating them evenly over both the fretboard and the pickup’s pole pieces. I then used my handy Stew Mac string spacing ruler to layout the remaining 4 strings. The slots in the ruler get wider moving towards the bass side and are graduated based on string gauge, allowing the strings to be evenly spaced on center. After starting the slots with the proper gauge file to acommodate the string, I strung up the rest of the strings and continued slotting to match the fretboard radius.

Tuned to pitch, the bridge was nearly perfectly intonated. I made some minor adjustment with a file and polished out any imperfections. I was pleasantly surprised at the tonal change and the customer got exactly what he was hoping for. The treble harshness of the metal bridge was gone, and the mellow character of the flatwound strings seemed right at home on this new wood saddle.

The photos below show the FIRST guitar built in the Easthampton shop. It is a parlor guitar modeled after Martin’s Model 1, the precursor to the O size. It measures 12 3/4″ at the lower bout. It has 12 frets to the body, an Adirondack Spruce top sourced from John Arnold/Ted Davis, East Indian Rosewood back and sides, Ebony fretboard and Bridge, Maple side purfling, Rosewood soundhole surround, 25″ scale, and Grover open back 18:1 tuners.

In 2005 I built him the guitar that has toured the world with his solo material and with Battles, the avant-rock “super group” known for live looping of voice, guitars, and keyboards. There are many unique things about this instrument even though at a quick glance it would appear to be a straight up jazzmaster copy. It’s neck angle is increased to allow for a tuneomatic bridge and stop tailpiece, and a I made a custom mute bar that can be quickly accessed to dampen the strings slightly for his left hand tapping, while playing keyboards with his right. Along with the humbuckers, the wiring is quite different from your typical jazzmaster. I hope to feature this guitar in future posts but for now here’s a couple of video’s showing Tyondai’s musical versatility while performing on his Healy.

The first video features Tyondai just destroying it with Battles:

In this one he’s in a much more subdued roll in “Listen to This” with Alex Ross. These passages have a nice clear tone, and show the guitar close-up. You might just learn something too.