PATRICK OGLE: Now, we had talked about this. Here's the other -- There's a number of problems with the guitar, but you know it sounds kind of cool.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah. You know, one of the best buys that you can find around are the old Harmony Sovereigns.

PATRICK OGLE: I have one.

CHRIS EUDY: Which is like -- It's like a D18, really. I mean it's all, you know, mahogany and solid top. It's a very nice guitar that you can pick them up for nothing.

PATRICK OGLE: I got one for less than $200, and this one cost significantly less than $200 I believe. But the -- One thing I found about Harmonies is that they never used laminate.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: It was all wood.

CHRIS EUDY: It's all solid that's why they're so good.

PATRICK OGLE: This is mahogany and I don't think the neck is adjustable.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah. No, they're not. They do got -- They say it's a steel reinforced neck which means it does have a truss rod. It's just not an adjustable truss rod, which you know a lot of guitar manufacturers, Martin included, Martin Guitars didn't start putting adjustable truss rods in their guitars until, you know, 1980 -- between 1983 and 1985. A lot of builders say that if it's built right, you don't need one.

PATRICK OGLE: Right.

CHRIS EUDY: Which, you know, it doesn't count for the fact that it's going to have 30 years of 175 pounds of pressure on the neck, so it doesn't --

PATRICK OGLE: Right. So this also, the tuning pegs are horrible.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: They need to go.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: You can't turn them, which is tough.

CHRIS EUDY: That's a problem. You can't tune a guitar. Yeah, you see a lot of these. You see these tuners in a lot of these old guitars. Yeah tat's not a problem. Kluson makes a good set that should just drop in.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah. They don't need to be expensive.

CHRIS EUDY: No. They're not super expensive. They're pretty nice guitars. It looks to me like someone maybe put a shim on this at some point. I can see in there. It looks to me like there's, you know, it's gapping here. I'm not sure if that's wood or that's wood filler through here. I don't know if you can see that there in the camera.

GRETCHEN HASSE: Oh yeah.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah. Where the neck appears to have come loose at some point, and someone seems to -- It looks like it's been squeegeed in there. It looks like a filler. They just squeegeed some filler in there, and that happens a lot on old guitars, period. You know, you see it more often on the less expensive guitars, but every Martin that comes in here every -- about 30 years or so to have the neck reset, you know, where we got to steam the neck, we cut the dovetail joint, put the neck back on. We don't always recommend that on these guitars unless you really want to -- you know, if you want to spend money and make it play beautiful, we can do that, but it's generally not worth it. If the neck angle is off a little bit, there's a couple of different things that you can do, not on this guitar because of the way that the bridge is, but sometimes we can plane the bridge down and this route this out the slot. We usually lower the bridge and kind of change the angle there.

PATRICK OGLE: Right.

CHRIS EUDY: There's also something we like to call the hippie neck reset, which is where you actually just take a razor saw and saw through this joint here up to about where the truss rod would be on this guitar, and then we put a strap button on it. And so you take off the material that way...

PATRICK OGLE: And then you bolt it back on with the strap button.

CHRIS EUDY: ...and then it kind of kicks the neck angle back.

PATRICK OGLE: Okay.

CHRIS EUDY: It's a little less expensive obviously than steaming the neck off and doing all that work.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah, and this kind of -- Sorry, it’s also not necessarily a bad idea then to have a ...

CHRIS EUDY: To have another strap button.

PATRICK OGLE: ...a strap button. Yeah.

CHRIS EUDY: You get to have another strap button on it.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah.

CHRIS EUDY: So, you know, that would be a pretty -- I imagined, in order to make this guitar play relatively comfortable, that's you might want to do that, especially once the top gets rebraced because it's going to lift the top up and then the actions going to be, you know, like that high on the fingerboard.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah. You know.

CHRIS EUDY: The bridge is coming off of this as well.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah.

CHRIS EUDY: But it is, you know, settled in place with screws, and it's probably been like that for 20 years.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah.

CHRIS EUDY: So, you know, you can re-glue this or you can leave them alone.

PATRICK OGLE: This is a $68. Now, I think that they started making these the next year with the adjustable truss rod...

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah. They --

PATRICK OGLE: ...for a couple of years.

CHRIS EUDY: Some of them do have that.

PATRICK OGLE: But I botched it and bought the wrong year.

CHRIS EUDY: Wrong year. [LAUGHING]

PATRICK OGLE: I thought I had the right -- I had read the articles [INDISCERNIBLE]

CHRIS EUDY: [LAUGHING]

PATRICK OGLE: And then put a --

CHRIS EUDY: Do it with a bolt neck.

PATRICK OGLE: A bolt neck.

CHRIS EUDY: We call that a bolt neck reset, but like I said, amongst the shop...,

PATRICK OGLE: Hippie.

CHRIS EUDY: ...it's the hippie. Yeah , it's like we're going to do. We're going to fix this guitar. We'll just saw the neck right off.

PATRICK OGLE: [LAUGHING]

CHRIS EUDY: And you still -- You see that a lot on the '70s and '60s Martins where they've literally sawed the neck off the guitar to do a neck reset on it.

PATRICK OGLE: Which is kind of weird because those are expensive guitars.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah, but years ago people did not know much about, you know, repairing, really repairing guitars. And this, in the late '60s, early '70s, it was a relatively new thing after the boom of the '40s and '50s and rock & roll, and then '60s came around and more rock & roll. You know, it was a new craft, let's say, for a lot of people, and they thought, you know, they just apply some abstract knowledge to fixing that guitar, so you do see that a lot, so.

PATRICK OGLE: Okay, so we got the tuning pegs, bye bye to the tuning pegs, the hippie neck adjustment.

CHRIS EUDY: Right.

PATRICK OGLE: If you can clean this crap off...

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah, yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: ...that would be wonderful, and --

CHRIS EUDY: I imagine we would be able to get that clean.

PATRICK OGLE: And the, you said the neck -- I mean what's the difference? How much is that going to cost to have that re-glued.

CHRIS EUDY: Typically, on the street it's $100 without any other work like if we're doing a setup and a bridge re-glue on acoustic guitar, it's a $100 repair. If you do it in combination with other stuff...

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah, a combination with all this though.

CHRIS EUDY: Yeah, we generally take, you know, we'll take 25 bucks off of that cost.