Framus is a big old brand of instruments. The first one I was familiar with was off-branded, my good friend’s mahogany looking seventies model Texan guitar, they sold many of them, they are composite dreadnaught guitars with a bolt-on neck like plywood and an adjustable bridge. The first one I owned, I found in an antique shop on Antique Row in Victoria and I bought it because my friend had passed and I wanted one like his. It was a different finish, in near mint condition, and I spent good stupid money putting it shape, that pretty, awful sounding plywood guitar, because it was the first time I had found one that fit my hand.
I own several of those necks now, but I’ve started throwing the bodies away and I keep looking for a better body to put them on. I put one on a new and broken in shipping archtop electric, that one I like, and I have a few wall hanger things with them on, but really, it’s just to keep the neck. So I was searching for bodies, broken guitars for this project, and at the end of August, 2019, I bought the Vega – see the other blog.
This I learned was a Japanese, epoxied, un-resettable guitar. What I didn’t really understand was that these Martin copies are a long way from being American Martins. I thought this was a very good box, good enough for a project, and I imagined a way to reset it, by simply sanding it and adding wood from above – what I did, again, see the Vega Project blog. But again, I had overestimated the sound quality and worth of the Vega, I wanted a practice project first.
My ’66 Framus 5/96, an early Texan, I found this online dead and end of life not two full weeks later, with this in mind. You could see the solid wood top in the ad, and you could see it wasn’t the bolt-on neck sort. I heated it up and took the fretboard off to access the broken truss rod, and I simply built up the wood under the fretboard with a back-bow, using layers of mahogany veneer. I used a modern torsion rod from another project and a newer fretboard from a third. I couldn’t find a new saddle to fit, the old slot was very thin, and so I gouged it out and used something stupid, an entire metal saddle assembly from one of the composite Texans.
Are you hearing this?
All this make-do stuff for my “practice project?” Destroying the vintage bridge?
The errors never end.
The fact that I could heat it up and remove the fretboard means I could have heated it up and reset the neck properly! The funny moment came on slow, as that project got where it was playable and the sound of the practice guitar slowly swept me off my feet. My ear is crap, but I can every little thing on every string, all the time, it never goes to mud, like the composite ones sound like all the time.
And the Vega sounds muddy by comparison too. Upon further research, the Vega was easy, it’s a solid top and composite sides and back – it’s the Framus that’s the real thing, solid sides too, and the back is composite for a reason, for the molded shape that can’t hurt the sound, because nothing is hurting the sound.
Long story short, I think I’m back to the drawing board, I think my Framus deserves a better treatment. As nice as I think it sounds, and as nice as it fits my hand, I’m afraid I have to rip it all apart again!
Again, though, it’s my best one, and it’s going to take some time to do a better job – honestly, I can reset the neck, but there’s nothing left of it since it’s small enough for me. I think it needs both now, a reset and a build up. And here, a thing learned from the Vega – that rosewood is tough stuff, if you want it skinny and strong. I’ll farm out the reset itself, I want the angle proper and I’ve never done it, and then I’ll give it one and a half or two layers of fretboard, for strength, give it another forty years. Fill and fix that bridge, get a proper saddle in there, which I have, nice huge chunk of bone that will work since I have to make the slot for whatever I use, and I have a nut also. I have plenty of old fretboards for under, I’ll just have to deal with ordering a new blank one and sawing the slots, they don’t pre-slot them for short scale, 24 ¾” guitars.
Big dreams. I don’t wanna do it! Also, as stated in the other one, I’m still the guy who hasn’t had real success installing frets yet.
But I want it to get done.
I should, I should . . . but I put myself through a lot with these things, drama queen, I go through the whole experience, agony and ecstasy.
It’s a guitar project. Vega is a brand name, “a part of the Martin organization,” made in Japan. It’s a 1974 dreadnaught with a solid spruce top, otherwise laminate. The top is very nice, the condition was very nice except near end of life, and it looks like a Martin on the inside. It sounds OK, a lot of bass, like a Martin, sort of.
It still played nice when I bought it a year ago, but end of life, the truss rod was tight and the saddle was so low it was almost gone. That looked its forty-six years old, but otherwise really pretty, I suspect it had been refinished.
I destroyed all of that!
Famously, the Japanese Martins are not resettable, they were put together with epoxy glue, never to be disassembled. End of life for these guitars is a bit more literal than with a real, wood glued, American Martin, and once the saddle is gone and it can’t be bent any more, the next phase of life is the dumpster. I believe the going rate for these still good end of life epoxied guitars is in the $400 – $500 dollar range in great shape, that’s what I paid, usually for the pleasure of riding them into the ground. I had heard this, about the glues, but for some reason I thought they were talking about the neck joint, not the whole thing, I don’t know why, but I had plans to peel the fretboard off, and that also isn’t a thing you can do.
So it became a battle of attrition. I sanded the darned thing off instead.
The project had two goals.
One, I wanted to reset it in an unorthodox way, give it forty years again, because two, I need to pare my guitar necks down skinny in order to be able to play at all, small hands, and there’s no sense doing all my size modifying to and end of life guitar. I mean, I’m approaching that phase too, I don’t want to be doing this again in ten years when I’m seventy and again at eighty. Happily, both goals were at the end of a lot of simply sanding a whole bunch of wood off.
I pulled the frets and then sanded the existing fretboard completely off at both ends, leaving some towards the middle, in a back bent arc that is the opposite of the end of life curl, and then I purchased a Martin style fretboard and glued that on top – this worked in the end, but there has been much learning.
I don’t know if the other Japanese Martin associated guitars – Sigma, is the only brand comes to mind at the moment – have all the troubles my Vega did: it wasn’t even the right size.
Most guitars, Martin guitars, but most have a scale, string length, of twenty-five and a half inches. There is another scale, twenty-four and three quarters, I have old Framus guitars like that, and I think at least some of the Oscar Schmidt/Washburn are short scale, but my assumption that my Martin copy was Martin length caused a wrinkle. The new fretboard is standard but trying to apply it over the old one didn’t work; and I had cut the new one too short before I learned it. This here is a nineteen fret guitar, I accidentally removed the wood for a twentieth, and it’s just off: the fourteenth fret is not at the edge of the body, it’s a quarter of an inch on!
The Vega was a twenty-six inch scale guitar! Or close – you can see an extra half an inch of the thin part of the neck above the nut, before it widens for the headstock now, ha.
It’s a proper Martin sized guitar now, twenty-five and a half, and the intonation is right. It just looks a little homemade. Happily again, I like homemade looking. That’s my brand.
Part of the paring it down for my little hands process is sanding the finish and a bunch of wood off of the back of the neck, and I have yet to match the finish, you can always tell it’s been done – and I made that a theme, that looks rough where my new finish meets the old, so rough is the theme. I scratched the headstock off except for the brand name, ground the stupid points off the top of it.
I made a wooden pickguard to match the sides for grain and colour, but rough, and then I sanded most of the shiny finish off and re-sprayed it in satin finish all over. Another part of the down-sizing is reducing the spread of the strings, a Stratocaster sized nut, and a notched saddle. If I ever get a great old real wood one to do, I imagine I’d do a new bridge and drill the string holes closer together, maybe staggered, like on a twelve string, but it doesn’t seem practical moving the holes on this one, there isn’t enough room behind for new ones.
Having said that, it’s a new bone saddle, notched out by Dremel and shaped nicely. Homemade, still nice. I will do a prettier fret job when my tools and/or skills improve, but I’ve done what I hoped, the truss rod is slack, it’s new again, decades in it again, it has that diamond in the rough vibe, and it fits my hand.
What if say, it was 1937, you’re a German citizen, white, Christian, but not Nazi, and you have lost a lottery, suffered a rare crime, decades of persecution by perhaps ironically, a particularly evil Jew? Surely there are evil Jewish people, not making any equivalencies, suppose there were ever only one evil Jewish person and you were their victim?
Should you cry out, should you tell?
Truth is truth and justice is justice, and truly, your life has been ruined by this criminal – should you be alerting the world to the presence of one evil Jew at this point in history? Or should you perhaps take one for the team and not add your true story to the general stream of violent propaganda?
What if it’s not over? What if telling the newspaper your story were the only way to escape your victimization? What if the better life you hope to gain is among the Jews?
Allegory, innit.
Until I solve this dilemma, I can’t write my SilverSingles profile, is the thing.
I was never this guy, I never blamed my problems on women or girls, I do not have a long list of such persecutors. I was raised by women, hurting women, and I was raised to be the equivalent in my allegory of a self-hating Jew, meaning a self-hating man, and I blame men, generally. So we have a problem, I am not this guy, I cannot be this guy, the world has made me this guy – I cannot be. I’m pre-amok, pre-suicidal, until something cracks this moral dilemma for me, can I tell my story, or is it simply too toxic and needs to be supressed?
You see this? Comparing the sufferings of women (white, middle class women, even) to the persecution of Jews, etc., in the holocaust?
Not that guy.
But here I am, perhaps because I was not that guy, someone who was that gal took advantage.
I mean, I’m not the strong silent type, it’s not a secret to my readers, if they exist – only to anyone who matters, anyone might have any power to resolve anything in my life. I have repeatedly attempted to write the newspapers (my blog) about my persecution, in times when it seemed a matter of self defense, of my life or death, and in fact that is what I’m doing again now, for the same reason again.
In a fit of loneliness and perhaps hypomanic optimism, I activated my SilverSingles account, I must have forgotten my prison, my story and there is no way to tell my story that isn’t a red flag. It’s calling to me, the Telltale Socialized Pool of Hearts, but I look too much like that guy and I can’t spread the evil sexist propaganda whether it was true in my life or not, and I can’t have a relationship where I can’t tell the truth . . .
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