Bagging
The last thing I’ll talk about this time is rehydrating a guitar through the use of the bagging technique. If a guitar is dry, any cracks will open up and become very difficult to glue back together. There are other problems caused by dry guitars–sunken top, fretboard hump, sharp fret ends, weird neck angle–but they all come back to the same thing: wood shrinkage. What bagging will hopefully do for us in this case is close up the wider cracks. When they’re tight we can glue them and expect good results.
The first thing that goes into the bag is a big, damp bath sponge (pictured). This sits at the bottom of the bag. It’s important that we minimise excessive water. We don’t want a pool at the bottom or the inside of the bag to be sopping wet.
Next, the guitar goes into the bag. It never touches the sponge. It never touches the bottom of the bag. We don’t want a guitar sitting in a puddle for 3 days. That would be bad. |
So, the Cortez went into the bag for a few days, and when it came out, the few wide cracks had closed up and we were able to proceed with gluing. I’ll go through that next time, how we use rare earth magnets, and the process of making a new, accurate bridge. See you then!
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