Slide guitar / now to hack or not to hack? (hack for the win)

 

A while back I mentioned that the Mytlewood guitar's top was damaged and I was working on replacing it.  The new top is made out of Alaskan Yellow Cedar, with an offset sound hole, and the hybrid X-brace/fan bracing I have been using recently. 

It sounds quite lovely.

And then the trust rod broke. Sigh.  At the moment it is great for slide guitar and cowboy cords.

I figure I should bother to take a photograph of it in its current state before I pull off the neck and decide what to do with it.

Update:  I pulled the neck and yanked out the truss rod.   Same exact truss rod as the one in this video, I used basically the same technique to get it out.  And pretty much the same problem, the 4mm nut had broken.   Unfortunately the light at the end of tunnel was not as much of a happy ending.

Holding the neck just right in the setting sun, you can see the shadow of fibers that have split under the stress.

 

This is a thin neck....  the right thing to do would be to remove the fingerboard, fill in the channel, cut a new one for a low-profile truss rod, and reinstall the fingerboard.

I think I will mull over doing the wrong (easy) thing first.  What is the worst thing that can happen?  If it goes bad, I would have to remove the finger board, fill in the channel, cut a new one for a low-profile truss rod, and reinstall the fingerboard....

Update 6/13/24:   Replacement truss rod was delivered.  I noticed that the diameter of the nut was just slightly larger than the block and I had not accounted for that - the neck was pushing on the nut. Over the years as adjustments were made pressure was put on different sides of the nut until it eventually weakened and broke. So the root cause was a manufacturing defect (mine), not a fault of the original truss rod.  I fixed that before tapping in the new truss rod.

I then mixed up a batch of thin hot hide glue, injected it into the cracks, wrapped it in parchment paper, then wrapped the whole neck tightly with rubber bands.   The cracks are now gone....  score one for the lazy method of repair.

Hacking

 

Here is a fun one I put down in the basement and forgotten about....   One lovely spring/summer day I had just read an article about someone who was developing plans for musical instruments requiring minimalist tools, materials, and expertise. The idea being to help bring music to developing economies and the like where expensive instruments are unlikely to be feasible.

Dan Young and David Pierce stopped by the house and we chatted about how interesting this concept was. So we decided to take a crack at it.   We made an electric guitar using a pine board for the body, held together with screws; tuners made from eye bolts and wing nuts; pickup made from the magnet in an old broken hardrive and the coil from an old-fashion "wall wort" power supply & held together with duct tape; and wrapped the whole thing in nylon string (fishing line, weed wacker string? I don't really remember) to make frets.

 Plugged it into an amp and it worked (for rather generous interpretation of the word "worked").  The tuners are perhaps not the finest I have ever used.  The frets are a suggestion of where a note may be, and they easily move.   But it does indeed make a rather glorious noise.  Dave and I were not particularly successful at "making music" with it, but Dan managed a rather excellent gritty blues riff (I.e something that was recognizable as music)

Looks like I swiped one of the eye bolts, possibly for whatever project I had actually bought them for.  The duct tape needs to be refreshed as well, it is now hitting the strings.