Making the Visible Invisible - Repairing a Japanese Fender Headstock

The epoxy job went well, it's tricky of course, but the main thing is that it's flat on that part, so both sides of the crack are level. This part also went in fine and even the part I was worried about looks good, it's a I might be a little bit proud just there but it might be the epoxy, I can't tell yet and I think that's pretty good there too, oh so I've been working on the top of this

headstock

and I've been using my cute little Ryan Gerber scraper, these are about 25 bucks and they're fantastic, so I was using that to scrape up some epoxy.

It is proving to be a perfect tool for many things, the only woodworking I will ever do. What I have to do is right here, there's a piece missing. I'm not sure how well I'll be able to fit it in, but I'll try without adding some wood to get some bits. I'm just going to fill it with thin glue and then I'll go back and deal with the color issues, so this is a sealer coat, so here's the ugliest and most obvious leak, however you can see it's under a washing machine, like this That's actually it, you can see where it broke when it hit the edge of the washer because it fell upside down and this particular tuner went through the back, but luckily I have the little bit that goes inside and again I didn't want to try and deal with this at the same time as everything else when I was gluing it.

Well, I'm going to do it. I just want to get it flush. I don't really care if it fits well. the ends or something like that, I'm going to deal with that separately, I'm going to hit it with some AC and I'm going to really soak it because there's. I'll show you another angle, but it's pretty empty underneath, so there's The missing wood is kind of a candidate for um and I'm going to build this section because it's depressed, I'll probably have to do that in some applications so you can see how much wood is missing. below, but we'll deal with that here. an action shot of uh just filling that depression, where the washer hit the wood, overfilling the cracks came together nicely, so the grain like the rainbow and the crack go here, so I'm not too worried about the back, but I'll probably play in the back first to try to do the next part, which I'll show you in a second.

The front, there are some problematic parts specifically here between these two and kind of here as well. I don't worry about this circle because the tuner will cover it completely, but it's just these other parts that I'm going to try to make more in

visible

and to do that I'm going to use little brushes where, hello, future. arch here, it's been about 2 years since I did this repair, it's now March 2024 and I think I did this in 2022, so I thought I'd talk about not the products I used back then, but the products I would use now to do.

Same thing, first thing I would still use epoxy for this job because the neck had so many different brakes and little pockets of stuff that it needed the 25 minutes of open time that West systems with the slow curing epoxy resins 205 and 206. The slow hardener it gives you about 25 minutes 20 25 minutes of open time and I really needed it all because getting everything wet with epoxy and holding it down was a real problem. I didn't bother doing it, but the hardest part to figure out. The clamp was the brake that was here, there was a long crack so far down that when I tightened this thing that way it made it come out and it was very difficult to hold this curve, so I had to make this jig that I fit in here and I got away with it.

I was actually lucky, very lucky I think, but I did it. I spent about an hour

making

this call, if I put it at the right angle and had the clamp at the right angle. The angle pushed everything in and it worked, which is why I use the epoxy. One thing I do now on most epoxy jobs is that I add something, a pigment, to create a color that approximates the color of the wood and I was not aware of this product in 2022 and therefore had what normally gives the epoxy, which is a pretty dark line.

Obviously it's more noticeable on Maple, but the product I now use or mix with epoxy is the Mok mix of all the pigments. and they come in a variety of colors. Stax sells the black and the burnt umber, I believe, and they're about $15 each, so they're a little pricey, apparently it's best not to mix them too much, but if you can find one that's perfect for what you're doing, well that this is wheat and it's probably something that I would have taken for the maple and mixed it with a little bit of white or something, but it creates an opaque pigment or an opaque epoxy that when you spend time mixing the right colors and just allowing the process to hardening or the epoxy curing process which darkens the color very slightly, it is really worth it because instead of trying to lighten a dark line, it is better to lighten the pigments a little and then you only have to darken a lighter line, which is much easier every time I use one of these, I get a drop and put it on the lid so I know what to expect when those two colors dry, russet maple and rock maple.

They're pretty close together, so the second thing I wanted to mention is how I colored over the crack and blended everything together. I used acrylic paints in this video. I wouldn't do that again although it worked well, what I would do now is use these pigments mix these are from Stuart McDonald, you can also get them on Amazon, links in the description, all that kind of stuff, but I would mix just a little bit of this with shellac like 1B or even a finer cut of shellac and it would build. It builds up the color that way, these are pure pigments so you have to mix them into something you can mix with anything like nitro polyurethane shellac, even I guess probably CA glue, they are about $5 each.

I think it's from Stac and there are a lot of different colors, it's copper, there's bronze, gold, silver and yellow, black, green, blue, white, of course it's used to sell them, what are they called concentrated pigments for lack of finished, but they don't sell them anymore, but if you have this, it would work like well, in shellac, so those are the two things I really wanted to mention that I would do differently and you know you can continue learning 2 years later no matter who you are , No matter how old you are. No matter who you studied with, you learn tips and tricks along the way and that's the beauty of it, so thank you very much.

And subscribe. The final result occurs now. Enjoy love can be a boat, a boat, a boat. Love can be a stone. a stone a stone love can be a candle a candle a candle that takes me from shore to shore to shore love can be a dream a dream a dream Love can be a game A game A game love can keep you real so real so real we I'm driving you crazy it's my creation to play and create oh it's my creation and create nothing is too safe play and create well it's my creation create nothing is too safe play create it's my creation nothing is too safe believe well it's my creation to say create oh it's my creation create a Safe create it's my create life can be a kite a kite a kite life can be a rope a rope a rope Lifting me high very high teaching me to sing to sing to sing red and green lights of red and green color in the scene the scene the scene metal wood and fire and fire and fire bringing me this melody well, it is my creation do not create anything for SA create is my creation do not create anything for sa play creat yes it is my creation this to say believe this this is my creation create nothing for sa create this is my creation say believe is my creation say create well is my creation is my creation