Guild D-37 Early 70s (72-73)

Client brought the guitar in with issues with high action. Otherwise, the guitar is a beauty and in pretty sweet shape for 45 year old guitar!

guild d 37 - 1 (1)

What I did notice were some things quite common to Westerly RI Guilds:

Bridge lifting slightly at the rear. Seems ok. If I were keeping it another 10-20 years, I might do a re-glue. Guild-ites purport that the widely changeable weather was in large part responsible for such typical Guild woes. Personally, I bought a new 72 Guild D-40 IN 72 and it was one of the prettiest playing and sounding acoustic guitars I’ve ever played, much less owned.

ANYWAY…

  • One of the things that was common was the angle of the neck, aka “neck pitch” is off just a tad, but, luckily, most of the Guilds have enough meat on the bridge (not the saddle, the bridge itself) to “shave” the bridge and re-cut the saddle (or in this case a NEW Tusq saddle).
  • DIVOTS! From high action and overly firm finger pressure to compensate, the frets were quite worn, readily seen Divots up and down the fret board. Level and Crown had to be done. I was able to do a quick scrape with a stainless scraper to lessen the effect of some of the slight divots on the fretboard itself!
  • Other than that, a neck adjust, new strings, nut shim, nu re-cut, buff and polish (YOU GOTTA take care of these nitro lacquer guitars boys and girls!!!)
  • Not that I like them, personally, but for some guitars the gauges work very well, so I used the Taylor Guitar design Gore strings, Elixir HD as a starting point and made up my own set. .013 .017 .024 .035 .045 .056. Since the original guitars came with 80/20 .013-.056″ or Mediums, I went with Nano 80/20.

The fingerboard is masked off. Frets are filed/ground to eliminate divots/grooves, whilst maintaining fingerboard radius (see next batch of photos). Then they are Crowned (re-shaped to have rounded peaks at the top of the frets and smooth transition to the fretboard). I then use graduated grits of sandpaper 320-400-600-1000-1500-2000 then I go to Micro Mesh MX400-600-800-1200 and, after a thorough cleaning (this fingerboard was FUNKY-had to scrape first, then clean with White 3M Mesh Pad) and a final buff with FretFactor’s Fingerboard Serum). For more info, please go to Level and Crown Info

Photos (Click on Thumbnail for larger image):