Leslies Lovely Levin

This Is Lesile Rich's Levin guitar. Lesile is one of the kingpins of  the continentially acclaimed

 

 

Groove City Guitars

 

in St Paul Mn. These guitars were made in Sweden in the same factory as Goya, purchased by Martin guitars and produced guitars until 1977

The neck need to rest which one would expect to find in a guitar of this vintage so the first hurdle was to manufacture a tool to remove the odd square head bolts

I've got a complete metal shop with a couple of milling machines so this wasn't much of a problem

All done !!!

Next remove the neck. the heel is bolted on but the "tongue" of the fingerboard is glued.

Carefully loosing the glue

And after removing the neck and trimming the heel a nice tight fit.

The purfling ring had becomed detatched so I cut some spruce to act as a backing

Clamping the srtips in place. Next time we'll show the custom electronics install

Buffalo Tom Progress report

Gluing the head and tail block

Back braced and ready for trimming

Gluing the kerfing

Top bracing

Starting to look like a guitar !

Buffalo Tom's Guitar

First you have to make a template

Then you need a bending form for the sides

and a frame to hold the sides square

Here is pic of the back. This is Claro walnut from Northern California.

And then we bend the sides !

Buffalo Tommy Reno gets a new guitar

Here is Buffalo Tommy Reno, a true renaissance man ! He's a philosopher, musician, poet, humorist, cowboy and FORMER ladies man . His beautiful gal, Sacred Woman sent me some money to make a nice guitar for him ( Ladies take note the true way to mans heart is with a guitar and I can help.)
Buffalo Tom and I got together and started to design this new guitar and since it was a shape that I don't normally make I thought I would post the process for every one to watch.

The sides on an acoustic guitar are particularily vunerable to impact damage as you can see on this Martin D 28

We

'll pay close attention tom getting the cracks lined up just perfect, and add lots of clamps.

Good as new !

I fix a lot of broken headstocks. Sometimes when the break is bad we have to fortify it with some inserts.

Turns out pretty good !

This an old Gibson with a bad top crack.The cross brace let loose and the pressure of the strings pushed the top into the sound hole.

The bridge was coming off.

and the tuner buttons had had dried up and most were completely gone

With a little TLC we got everything back to where it should be and kept it original. a happy customer.

So I got a template ( I must have a hundred different ones) and figured out where to put the access for the battery, got the router and....

All Done.

Here we wanted to put some EMG pickups in, but the battery would fit in the control cavity.

Just about done with my new CNC router

Paul Campbell inspired me so I decide to build my own CNC router. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with it, but that has never stopped me before.

I caught Mike by surprise !

We have been friends for 30 years and it would take me that long to tell you how much of a truly great human being he is . Mike's got a repair shop in St Cloud and there are few better than he is for fixing amps and such. He is a wizard with tube amps. http://www.miketechmusic.com/

Those large cracks are barely visible and this old girl is ready to go again.

I wish I'd gotten a little better pic....it turned out real nice and most important the customer was over-joyed !

Because we were going to refret the fingerboard , we decided to inlay his name in MOP.

HANDSOME !

Tape off the binding for the first stage of touch up.

There was no saving the old binding so we replaced it.We'll touch up the edge and "yellow" the binding some to make it look right.

Lots of clamps. These are a bugger because the sides "relax" when you take the back off and it's hard to get them match perfectly.

Lots of patching

This was a mess. I didn't get any pics of it before I started but it was in quite a few pieces.