Old Kalamazoo rib graft & neck reset

Here's a couple pictures of a repair I completed recently.  The guitar is an old Kalamazoo 00 shape.  It was in  need of a neck reset, and it had a giant piece of rib missing on the upper bout, treble side.  It also had lots of loose braces and top cracks.

The first step was to clean up the break in the rib, using a flexible straight-edge to map out cuts.  It was basically just a long "football" patch.  Since the neck was out, I could hide one end under the heel.  After beveling the side of the hole, and gluing in some cleats here's how it's looking:

At this point, I've also glued up all the cracks and loose braces.  Prior to gluing in the cleats, I also bent a piece of mahogany, and made a rubbing of the hole to rough-in the patch.

Then began the long process of fitting the patch, gluing it in and scraping it to match the ribs.  In the mean time, I was color matching on some mahogany scrap.

Once the patch was flush, and sanded out to 320, I applied my stain, and it was off to the spray booth for 8 coats of shellac.  After curing for a while, I sanded the patch with 2000 grit sandpaper and used a padding technique to bring the shellac back to a gloss.

The neck being glued back on.

In the end, I was happy to see this turn out well, and the customer was happy to have an old Kalamazoo to play fingerstyle on.  The color of the patch isn't exactly right, in some light it looks great, and in some it looks too tan. 

Here's a couple more photos of the patch.  It looks good in person, but is hard to capture on camera.

Setting up a new bass

Sometimes at the Acoustic-Corner, when the UPS freight truck pulls up, repair work is put on hold.

Here she is, fresh out of the box, a brand new Shen 80 3/4 upright bass. 

After about 6 hours of work fitting the bridge, reaming the end-block, setting the soundpost, and finally carving the bridge...we have another bass ready to go!