A Guitar Named “Jen”
Classical guitars are like violins: Regardless of price they tend to look the same, adhering to a very traditional design. I was looking for something a little different and found this for cheap on eBay: handmade by anonymous in 1974, recently restored with a new bridge and nut and some body work, but still not all the way there. High-end work it is not, but it’s got charm.
At the bottom of the checkerboard rosette it reads “JEN,” which is perhaps who built it, or who received it, we’ll never know. But Jen is my wife’s name, so in an act of pure devotion, I rationalized buying myself another guitar. She was quite touched.
I started to restring it and realized it had been strung backwards, i.e., you had to turn counter-clockwise to tune up to pitch. Very distracting and bothersome. It made me pause further and think: My fantastic repair guy in Dewsbury needs to see this guitar, he lives for this. What will he think? Could it be improved, maybe far beyond expectations? Or is it destined as a curio, something to hand down?
He had to replane, refret and refinish the whole upper part of the fingerboard, but that was pretty much it, and at a very reasonable cost. It’s a Frankenstein but it plays beautifully now, and feels totally unique as you’d imagine. It’s apparently a laminate maple top, so not totally incredible sounding, but still. Fingerboard is maple too, which you never see on a nylon-string, and it feels and looks great.
For a final touch, I committed my first act of lutherie: I replaced the tuning machines myself, with a cheap but better alternative. Our man in Dewsbury had discovered that the guitar was not strung backwards, in fact, but rather the plates themselves were installed backwards. So that problem remained unsolved — you still had to tune the wrong way.
I had a choice: Just live with the backwards plates or replace them. The gears were old and grungy, so I thought: How hard could this be? Harder than expected, of course.
First I had to realize that this guitar had the narrow, old-fashioned metal posts, not today’s industry standard. Nothing else would fit, so that led to one customer return and some more targeted shopping.
The right gears came in the mail, and getting to work I quickly found an even bigger problem: The cutouts and screw holes on the headstock were drilled according to specs that were backwards. In other words, the guitar wasn’t strung backwards, nor were the plates simply put in backwards — the whole tuning mechanism was planned, measured and drilled backwards.
Well, I had to carry on. So I put in the new gears “correctly,” i.e., backwards on this guitar, drove in the tiny screws in the wrong places until everything was solid, and got it done. Again, it’s not high-end work. The plates now overshoot the nice little figured contour on the headstock. I could have taken it back to Dewsbury, but I’m not sorry I took the risk. The point is to play the thing.
So here she is, JEN in all her refurbished glory, having a spin through my 29th Bach chorale in a series of 70. She could sound brighter and clearer in the low register; maybe mic placement can help. As a player though it’s got some truly one-of-a-kind qualities. Our man in Dewsbury seemed keen to put a pickup in it, so we shall see. Hope you enjoy. ◊
