Richards

On June 28th, 2025, a customer brought me a Richards guitar. I had to check online and this isn’t Richards Guitars from England. This is a hand made guitar from a luthier that studied under Jean Larrivee in British Columbia. The guitar I am working on is number 3 and dated April of 1978, the brother of this guitar owns guitar number 4.

Prior to the guitar being brought over, I talked to the customer over the phone and he said the neck had come off. At first, I had thought that the neck had snapped off for some unknown reason. Because the guitar wasn’t physically with him during the time or when the neck came off, he wasn’t sure how it was constructed.

The customer and his brother came together as the guitar was with his brother. We carefully took off the neck as we weren’t quite sure on the method used for the neck join. It was a mortise and tenon with two dowels installed into the mortise to give the tenon an interference fit. It is almost like a make-shift dovetail and the first I have seen of it. The norm would be a dovetail.

Some parts of the rosette had come off when the neck came off. Luckily, the brother managed to salvage the pieces. They were glued back onto the soundboard. A portion of the rosette was still on the fingerboard.

We discussed what probably happened. My guess was that the guitar was built with hide glue and it finally gave. You can see some glue on a few spots under where the fingerboard was. Actually, looking at that picture as I am typing this out, that could be hide glue or wood glue. I haven’t worked with hide glue enough to really say. And when I do work with hide glue, it would be on a violin where the colour of the wood would be stained a brownish colour already.

The was something in between the heel and guitar body. First assumption was that it was glue but when I went at it with a chisel, it fell apart and was like a grey powder. It made me think of something I read about shimming some Taylor guitars where they have a bolt on neck. Where you are supposed to fill the gap (if there is one) with some kind of a black putty.

With the go ahead from the customer, I installed a wood insert into the tenon like how I build my guitars. It would help with keeping that heel in there.

The neck was glued on in two stages. First would be to glue on the fingerboard back to the body as well as the dowel fitting. And the heel would be glued second since there is the gap from the substance between the neck and heel.

I did a quick check on the fingerboard radius. With it being played, there were some parts at 10 inch radius and flatter at other spots. There also isn’t a lot of fingerboard material to sand when this guitar needs new frets.

With the fingerboard glued on and dried overnight, I used epoxy to fill in the gap around the heel. I am not sure what the circumstances were that the heel wasn’t fitted on flush to the body but this is what I had to work with.

One thing I do is to set a neck straight before installing the strings. For electric guitars, I have noticed that when the neck is straight before installing the strings. It will have the correct relief after the strings are on.

The neck had an upward bow to it when I put a notched ruler across the fingerboard. There is a possibility that it had an upward bow from the fingerboard being worn as well but there was buzzing on the lower (tuned) strings. The string height was 2mm on the high E and 1.5mm on the low E at the twelfth fret. And all strings only had a clearance of 0.010″ at the first fret (typical is 0.020″ at the low E and 0.016″ at the high E).

The guitar is with a band-aid fix at the moment – I shimmed the saddle on the one half and stuck some paper under the low E slot at the nut. This was just to see if we can get it high enough to not buzz out. It still does slightly and the guitar has been taken to test out for the time being.

One thing I can say about this guitar is that the body is solid. It has a lot of weight compared to the bodies I make; it is made of a cedar soundboard and my guess would be Brazilian Rosewood for the back and sides. Old school style bracing for the back.