It's Election Day
I hope you have voted or will vote today. And I further hope you vote against partisan tribalism, juvenile name calling, authoritarianism, the flood of lies, cronyism, subverting the constitution, putting children in cages separated from their parents, and generally being a publicly-proud asshole. I also hope you voted against any politicians who supported the head rump in DC.
My Current Guitar Journey
After a hiatus of almost 20 years, I started playing the guitar again in the summer of 2019. At that time my only guitar was a 1998 Taylor 412ce. This being a solid-wood guitar, it requires humidification during the heating season, which is a bit inconvenient. It has a nice, protective hard-shell case, but taking it in and out of the case and always having to ensure that the in-case humidifier is not dry seemed too much of a hassle.
Thinking About a Cheap, Knock-around Guitar
So last fall I started shopping for a laminate-body guitar, which is less fussy when it comes to humidification; it's unlikely to develop sound-board cracks due to dryness. At my long-favored guitar seller, Elderly Instruments of Lansing, Michigan, I got talked out of buying an all-lamiinate guitar, which they don't even sell.
Instead, I bought a Taylor Academy12-en, which had a solid spruce top but laminated sides and back. It was also a nylon-stringed instrument with the body joint at the 12th fret. It wasn't quite a classical guitar though because the fingerboard was curved like a steel-string guitar.
Acoustic Set-up Issues
Even though both my Taylor guitars were set up either by Elderly Insturments or the Taylor factory, neither was actually within the action specifications published by Taylor. So with some trepidation I began the process of learning to set up my own guitars and acquiring the specialized tools to do so. With both of these instruments set-up modifications only involved adjusting the neck relief (the curvature of the neck) and lowering the saddle height.
The Electric Guitar Kit
Then over the winter of 2019-2020 I bought an electric-guitar kit. It was a Telecaster shape, but with a semi-hollow body -- often referred to as a Thinline (TL) The nature of these kits tends to be that if you follow the assembly directions, which are not at all detailed, you merely end up with a GSO: a guitar-shaped object.
Such was the case for me. So after carefully setting up my TL GSO to Fender specifications and putting on a new set of strings, it still didn't play quite right. It had string buzzes, which were coming from the saddle. After much consternation, confusion, and rumination, I realized that the neck pocket wasn't routed exactly right, and I needed a neck reset to change the angle just a bit to get more downward pressure on the saddles and thereby eliminate the buzzing. This reset is accomplished relatively easily on Fender-style guitars because the necks are bolted on rather that glued in. So by making a shim wedge of the appropriate size and thickness, one changes the neck angle.
So I played the remainder of the winter, spring and most of the summer of 2020 with my three guitars. By late summer I came to recognize that though I loved the tone of my nylon-stringed Taylor, the thickness of the nylon strings and the higher action that they require was incompatible with my steel-string guitars, which I had come to prefer.
So I sold the nylon-stringed guitar. But I still had a hankering for an acoustic guitar with steel strings that didn't require pampering and was inexpensive enough that I could take it anywhere without worry.
The Orangewood Experiment
Enter Orangewood Guitars, a relatively new mail-order-only company. Their PR is excellent and their reviews were over the top -- suspiciously maybe too good to be true. But I took a chance and ordered one of their lowest-priced full-size guitars: the Rey mahogany (all laminate) grand auditorium cutaway. Their guitars are advertized as manufactured in Indonesia and then get a so-called professional set up in the USA.
When it arrived it was good news and bad news. The good news was that it seemed well assembled from a visual point of view. The bad news was that the strings and frets were badly oxidized, the action was too high, the bridge was not fully glued in place (the corner of a sheet of paper could slip under the back edge a couple of millimeters in one spot), and the neck was seriously back bowed to compensate for set-up short cuts by their "professional" set-up technicians in California.
My Modification to the Rey Guitar
My previous experiences adjusting the action on my other acoustic guitars as well as assembling and setting up my TL allowed me to correct all the defects as follows:
- I removed the strings and straighted the neck via truss-rod ajustment
- I checked the frets for level, and they were close, but not to my satisfaction
- So I leveled and re-crowned the frets, which was a quick and easy job, and this also removed the oxidation
- I then put new strings on, which were of a thinner gauge (11-48)
- I adjusted the neck relief again using the truss rod
- The action was still too high (I was setting up to Taylor specs), so I filed the nut slots and lowered the saddle as much as I thought could be done, which wasn't quite enough to get Taylor action, but it was acceptably close
- I applied some water-thin super glue to the bridge-top joint in the spot where it was not completely glued down
- I reamed out the string-peg holes, which were a bit too small to allow the string ball ends to easily pass through. This also allowed the pegs to be positioned to a more uniform height above the bridge.
- Then I tuned to guitar a whole tone low -- to standard D tuning rather than standard E.
