Seagull acoustic guitar

*updated on February 13, 2024

This 1989 Seagul acoustic guitar was given to me on January 28, 2024 by Joe that plays bass guitar at the Sunday open jam nights at Branch 5. He mentioned the guitar to me back in December and that it needed work. Right away with the idea of getting a free guitar that needs work was interesting.

It’s one thing to build guitars but it is totally different when you have to fix something on it. And now after doing a bit of research into violin building and repairs, it’s interesting how the two instruments use different glues. Seems like violins are built to last centuries while a guitar’s life expectancy is around 100 years. 100 years – old in terms of a guitar but still considered on the “new” side for a violin.

Joe had told me he tried to repair the guitar before and it’s always hard to tell the extent of the damage without seeing what is going on in the inside. There were two cracks from each side of the bridge going to the bottom end and a crack right across the leading edge of the bridge. Along with the cracks, a large portion of both lower parts of the X braces had separated from the soundboard.

Because of its age, I initially wanted to salvage the soundboard as much as I could. My idea was to remove the bridge plate, route out the shape of the bridge from the soundboard, glue the bridge to a new bridge plate and glue that one piece bridge/bridge plate from the underside up – through the routed shape.

I took off the bridge, and routed the bridge through the soundboard. But the extent of the damage to the soundboard had left that whole area uneven – the wood was higher behind the bridge and maybe even dipped down at, and before the bridge. I tried to remove the bridge plate which I assume is a new piece of wood – looked like plywood to me – and the Cedar soundboard started to split when I tried to get in between the two pieces of wood. Glue can sometimes be stronger than the wood itself and from building a few guitars with Cedar, I find it flakes or breaks apart quite easily.

At this point, I had to replace the soundboard completely. Good thing I had one more piece of Cedar in stock – not really planning to bring more in unless a customer requests it specifically.

Apparently, at this stage of Seagull they were using bolts and wood inserts to join the necks. This guitar had two bolts and two Allen bolts higher up/closer to the soundboard. It does make for easier neck shimming if the neck angle goes off. After taking these bolts off, it was a matter of getting spatulas underneath to separate the fingerboard from the soundboard.

The good thing about the rosette was that it wasn’t something complicated or something I had to order in. It just looks like two pieces of purfling together which is what I did on the new soundboard.

The original soundboard was pretty thick at 0.132″ – I was taught to thickness the soundboard to 0.090″ as a final height and I almost forgot that the original soundboard was thicker. I sanded it down to 0.120″ and had to shim the underside of the fingerboard that extends onto the soundboard.

With the recent violin work that I have gotten in, I tried to use Titebond hide glue on the bridge as the strength rating is the same as Titebond original. I ran it by my teacher, Jeremy Hamm and he said not to use it at all and to only use Titebond Original for the bridge.

I felt that when I was working with the Titebond hide glue, it was really messy compared to Titebond Original. I was using up a lot more shop towels to clean up the squeeze out in comparison.

Having shimmed the fingerboard, the saddle was a little low, so I had to shim the saddle was well. Tension is now on the strings, the guitar is tuned to Eb. Let’s see how this Titebond hide glue will hold up.