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AJ's Musical Instrument Repair, Oreland, PA (2026)

09/27/2025

Let's get down & dirty!

08/27/2025

I like my bass necks like I like my women... with a slight curve? Umm...that doesn't sound right! 🤣 But, this is a cheapy neck for a Sterling by Music Man bass. I had purchased a bass by the same name a few years ago, but it had some neck issues. Too much fret buzz. Even leveling the frets couldn't solve it. The truss rod just wasn't pulling the neck as it should. So, I found a parts bass (by the same name) recently on Marketplace and got it for $100. But, this neck also has an issue, however, it has more hope than the original neck. It just needs more backwards bow (relief). So, it will now stay clamped to a board for a couple of weeks, with occasional heat treatments to set the curve where it needs to be. Don't try this at home, kiddies, unless you first consult with someone who knows what they are doing! You could break the neck or truss rod, or damage the truss rod anchoring point internally. Always loosen the truss rod nut all way out, first. I'll post the results in a few weeks.

08/19/2025

Some bassists either love or hate these Fender Coronado II basses. I happen to think they are very cool looking! This lovely, 1967 model came across my workbench. I was thrilled to work on it, and to get it into tip-top shape. It came in with a "no sound" condition, other than a slight ground hum when I touched the metal parts of each pickup.

Since there's no removeable access panel, or control plate on these kinds of hollowbody instruments, you have to remove the pickups, and pull the controls & wiring out through the pickup holes. Then, I use a very ingenious installation kit that's sold by "TV Jones" pickups to reinstall everything. It utilizes 5 lengths of clear, surgical tubing that you attach to each of the 4 potentiometers (volume & tone controls), and a long wooden dowel that you slide into the jack.

You first feed the pieces of tubing through the holes where the controls go through in the top of the body, then pull them all through the bridge pickup opening. The long wooden dowel feeds through the hole where the jack goes, and you push it through near that pickup opening as well. Then, securely push the jack onto the end of the dowel, then attach each of the tubes onto the tops up each pot (control). Then, start carefully feeding and pulling everything through, being careful not to let the tubing and dowel slip off. It sometimes takes a few tries, because all the wires and controls will sometimes get caught up and twisted around. It can be very frustrating at times, but you have to carefully and patiently examine the layout of everything, and make sure your tubing is layed out properly as to not get everything twisted around before you begin pulling everything through. This particular hollowbody instrument is kind of shallow, so some of the controls kept not wanting to flip right-side-up to come through their respective mounting holes. (Yes, quite a few choice words were emanating from my mouth at one point!) But, after the 4th try, everything was back in its rightful place.

Once you get everything in their proper holes, you then slide the washers and nuts over the top of each tube and onto their respective pots, as well as over the wooden dowel for the jack. Then, just spin them on a bit with your fingers, so you can pull off the tubes & dowel without having everything fall back into the body. Then, tighten everything up, push the control k***s back on, tighten the control k**b screws, (if that's the kind of k***s your instrument has), and then test for sound by tapping on each pickup, and testing the pickup selector switch BEFORE reinstalling the pickups. This way, it'll be less work for you if something went wrong and you find that you'll need to pull it all apart again, (and hit your head against your workbench several times!) 🤪 Luckily, everything went well, and no workbenches were hurt during this repair.

The pots & pickup switch also needed a thorough cleaning with contact cleaner spray actually to clean the outsides of all the controls, since they were all covered in a white, powdery oxidation/mold. Then, I cleaned & lubed the inerts of the pots with DeOxit F5 Fader cleaner spray. I also repaired a cracked solder joint on one of the ground wires, so that solved the no sound issue.

Then, there were all of these little chunks of old foam rubber (see photos) I kept pulling out of this thing! It was quite comical! Lol!! Just kept finding more & more as I went along! People did this to try to eliminate feedback in hollowbody instruments. But, it doesn't do much, from what I've read. My client prefers to leave it out after I get it all back together, and I agreed with him.

It also needed the last 8 frets to be leveled, re-crowned, and polished, because the fingerboard had warped a bit in that area, and was causing those notes to buzz and choke a bit against those frets. You must store these instruments either with an instrument humidifier in their case, or in a temperature and humidity controlled room at around 70ºF and 47% to 50% humidity, or pay the consequences of having it warp.

I also cleaned and moisturized the fingerboard with straight, pure mineral oil, polished all the frets, and the neck & body too, put a fresh set of LaBella flatwound strings on it, per customer's request, did a full setup; set proper neck relief, string height at bridge & string nut, and got the intonation as close as I could, considering that there are no individually adjustable saddles on this bass. The bridge actually has a hard, rubber insert that the strings sit on! Weird! But, it now plays like butter! Very comfy, short-scale neck, too! Sounds pretty cool, as well! I think my client will be very happy!

01/19/2025

Look at this cute, little grasshopper that hopped up onto my workbench! It plays very nicely! Especially, with those nice, Rotosound Swing Bass short-scale medium-light strings. It's brand new, and in for a setup, some fret edge filing/smoothing, and I'll be swapping out the stock pickup for a nice vintage style one from Lindy Fralin Pickups, that I recommended to my client. It's gonna be a tone beast!

01/16/2025

OK! So, here we go! I'm off & running on a curious project guitar that a client brought to me the other day for some TLC. It was a yardsale find!

I just joined a Vintage Vox FB page to try to find out more about it, because after looking at lots of photos of various iterations of Vox Teardrop guitars, I realized that none of them looked exactly like this one. I immediately got some expert advice from some great & very knowledgeable folks on that Vox page!

And, one guy who replied first, said that this is the actual, exact same guitar that he owned about 15 years ago! He had traded it for some other guitar to a friend he knew who used to own a music store not too far from my area. Wild stuff, huh?! So, here's what he told me;

So, the body is not genuine Vox. It looks as though it might have been either built from scratch, or from some kit or something. The pickups were made in Italy, so they were probably made by, or at least installed by, the "Eko" guitar company from Italy. In the mid to late '60s, Eko contracted with the UK-based company, Vox to make guitars for them, because they were getting popular, and couldn't keep up with demand. Also, I was told the neck plate is original Vox, but from a model called "Tornado". It has a serial # on it, and the page administer looked that up for me.

The previous owner also said that the neck is from a different Vox guitar, but we don't know from which model. We do know that it's definitely not from a "Tornado". Way different design.

He also told me that the body had no wood block under the (aftermarket) Bigsby tremolo bridge that someone had installed. (Might actually be a knock-off Bigsby too. Not sure yet, but will eventually look into it.) But, it looks like at some point in the last 15 years, somebody did a nice job of installing a wood block! BRAVO!! (See photo)

The control plate is definitely, without a doubt, homemade! Lol! As you can see in the pics, the person who made it thought the jack was going to go a bit more over to the side. (See pencil marks in pics)

Some of the wires look like they came out of a 1970s AM transistor radio I had when I was a kid! They're so thin! And, the soldering job? Oy!🤦🏻‍♂️ I'll be rewiring it all.

Good news! The pickups are all working. My client told me that one of them was not working. From the looks of the wiring/soldering, I bet a wire was shorting against something, and it moved away from whatever it was touching when I opened it all up.

The pots, (for those who don't know, is short for "potentiometers". It's the proper, technical name for the volume and tone controls), are both rated at 25K ohms, and the tone cap (short for capacitor) is a .1uF (short for "microfarad"). Wrong, wrong, wrong! All wrong! 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️ For single coil pickups, you usually want them to be 250k ohm pots. For dual coil, also known as "humbuckers", you want 500k ohm pots. (Not enough time to explain it all right now, other than telling you that it affects the tone.) Also, the correct tone cap should be rated at .047uF, not the .01 that's currently in there. This all explains why the pickups sound so thin and tinny.

The Pickup toggle switch works as follows: Up=bridge, Middle=middle, Down=middle & neck.

So, here's what I'm going to recommend to my client, so I won't need to modify anything:

Replace the tone pot with a stacked one, so the guitar will then have 2 tone controls, and 1 volume control. Just like a real Vox Teardrop model does, or the same as a Fender Stratocaster does. But, in this case, the 2 tone controls will be a "stacked" type, one on top of the other, so I won't need to drill another hole. All three controls will be 250k ohm pots, and I will swap the tone cap out for the proper .047uF cap.

Rewiring is a MUST! Lol! I will use much better quality wire, and need to clean up the sloppy soldering in there. Yikes! Lol! I might also try to get ahold of a 5-way rotary switch for the pickups that should retrofit perfectly into that hole. Then it will operate like a true Vox, (or like a Strat), as follows:
Bridge, bridge + middle, middle, middle + neck, neck.

The neck is another story. But, I haven't gotten that far just yet. More on that soon.

But, I'm having fun digging into this project! It looks generally like a happy, little guitar that's looking at me and politely asking, "Can you please help me? Pleeease?" Yes...I will do my very best, my little Vox-wanna-be friend! (Sorry...didn't get much sleep last night. I'm a bit loopy! 🤪) Stay tuned for more!

12/25/2024

🌲☃️🕎
Happy Holidays to all of my friends & clients! Hope you enjoy!!!

12/04/2024

Well, it's been a while, but between gigs and family life, I'm still here performing expert repairs, setups, and mods (at client's requests) on all types of guitars, bass guitars, mandolins, ukuleles, electronic keyboards/synths, amps, PA speakers, effects pedals, etc... I'm also going to attempt to change the name of this page soon to the all-encompassing title of, "A.J's Instrument Repair Shop". (If FB will allow me to do so. So far, I can't figure out how to do it from my phone. Lol!) Hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving! Here are a few pics of 2 keyboard repair jobs I just completed. The Korg CX3 had a blank display screen. I found a blown surface mounted mini fuse on the circuit board. Replaced, and it's as good as new! The other one is a 1996 Kurzweil PC88 that is heavy AF, and took up my entire work bench! It had a no sound issue. But, the problem was in a power distribution connection with 3 of its 10 pins having cracked solder joints. Solved! But then I also found a hammer weight that had broken off, and that fell out the side when I opened up the casing. They don't make new parts for this cool dinosaur anymore, so I found one in good condition on Ebay for around $11. Installed & solved! Then, I found quite a few squeaky and noisy keys. This happens when grease dries up. So, I pulled out all 88 keys, lined them up in order, and cleaned out the key bed, and lubed up all points that required the pure silicone grease that I applied. No more squeaks/noise, and the action feels like new again! I'm located in the NW 'burbs of Philly, near Glenside, Erdenheim, Cheltenham, Wyndmoor, etc... Let me know what you need serviced by connecting with me in a PM. (I do that first to screen out the scammers.) Happy Holidays!!!

05/10/2024

Well, it's been a bit since I've had time to post on my page here. I wanted to share with everyone a recent repair project I completed last week that I did for my son, who is 11.

He decided this year to take up bass guitar (just like his Daddy!) through his Middle School band! I am super proud of him!! He is now officially the 6th grade school band bassist! I had already bought him a short-scale Ibanez Gio Mikro bass about 2 years ago that I did some setup work on, and it plays very nicely, hoping that perhaps one day he might be interested in it. He had played percussion for 2 years in school.

So, the first bass I bought him, just has the 1 P-bass style pickup, and it's kind of a drab looking black/gray color. We saw a pic of the vibrant blue model with the P/J pickups online a while back, and he seemed to really like that one.

So, I found a used one a few months ago on the Goodwill Finds website, and also found a $50 off $100 coupon code online! With the $15 shipping, I was in at $85 (as-is, no returns). I figured that there might be something wrong with it, but took the gamble anyway.

Sure enough, the neck had a very nasty twist in it, with a bad hump on the treble side at around the 4th fret. It only seemed to affect the G string, however. Unfortunately, I thought I had taken a pic of the twist/hump, but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, I've included several photos of some before and after shots.

First thing I did, was to heat up and clamp down the neck to try to get out the twist. I repeated this process about 4 times over a period of 2 weeks carefully using a heat gun, and unclamping it every 3 or 4 days to see if it was working. It was getting better, but not good enough.

However, on the 4th try, the neck snapped at what is known as the scarf joint, which is located on the back of the neck, approximately behind the 3rd fret. Luckily, it was a pretty clean break at that joint, so I immediately shot some Tite-bond wood glue into the gap, lined it up, clamped it down tightly, and let it dry overnight. Worked like a charm! Then I sanded down the excess glue that oozed out, and got it all nice & smooth.

Secondly, I heated up (using an old soldering iron) & pulled out every fret, keeping them in order for later use, since they were all in practically new condition with barely any wear.

The neck has an odd radius. It's a tad over 13", and the closest radius sanding blocks I have are 12", so I used those (8" & 4" long ones), along with a straight 8" one as well to work out some of the kinks in this fingerboard.

After taking quite a bit of wood off the fingerboard, I was able to even it out, and take out that nasty hump too! Then I slightly deepened and cleaned out the fret slots using a Zona 4-in-1 model # 35-140 Razor Saw Set. Worked beautifully! Worked the frets back into place using my trusty fret hammer, but I did have to super glue & clamp down a few fret ends to keep them from popping up. Typical of this type of repair if you're reusing the old frets. No problem though.

Then, I did a fret level/re-crown/polish job, strung it up with a set of Rotosound RS66LB Medium-light roundwound strings (cut them down to fit the 28.5" scale), my string of choice! And, here's a shout out to Rotosound Strings for keeping me all strung up over the years! (Been using Rotosounds since 1981, and I'm fortunate and very grateful to be an endorsed Rotosound player!)

Then I shielded the control cavity, re-attached the neck to the body, and did a full setup.

It plays fantastically now! Was a lot of work, but worth it for my awesome son! 🥰

02/13/2024

Well, it's been a busy while since I've had time to post stuff. So, my son decided to follow in his Daddy's footsteps, and at the tender age of 11, he started taking bass lessons from his school's music teacher! I'm super proud of my boy!!! I bought him a good, used Ibanez Gio Mikro Bass about 2 summers ago, in hope that he might be interested in learning someday, since he was thinking about it for a while. Plus, I thought it'd be a good, little, compact bass to take on family vacations with me. But, that bass only has the single P-bass style pickup, and is a kind of blah, charcoal black color. It's OK, but I think my son would've like something more colorful. Up pops this nice, vivid blue, dual pickup model on the Goodwill Finds website that popped up in my feed a few weeks ago. It was tagged at $114, used. Then I saw a box at checkout that said, "Enter discount code". Hmmm...let's search for one! Lo-and-behold, a $50 off coupon code comes my way!! Plus, free shipping! SOLD!!!

Well, I received it in about 4 days! Very quick delivery! But, the neck has a very, very bad twist in it, and it was sold "as is". So, here it is in these picks. The body needs a little Goo-Gone to get that bar code sticker off...no problem. I'll tend to that later. That's the least of the problems! So, it's been clamped down on my workbench for about 3 days now, and I took it off just before to see how it was. Good news! It's getting there! I'll leave it clamped for about another 4 days and check again. First, you must loosen & remove the truss rod nut to relieve the neck of all pressure. I recommend wrapping the neck in a heating pad on high for like an hour. Then use some common sense when clamping it down. You want to reverse the twist, so you want to push it the opposite direction, and crank it down very slowly just a bit past where you want it to end up, because the wood will want to rebound back a bit when you remove the clamps. I'll post back on here when it's done.

01/01/2024

A Happy, healthy, peace-filled, and musical New Year to you all!!!

12/25/2023

A very Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! And, a Happy, peacefulness New Year to all!

12/07/2023

Here's a fun project I built many years ago, in like 1996. I even etched the PC board. Lots of fun to make!! It's sort of based on the Tube Screamer overdrive circuit, minus the tone control. I could add it if I wanted to though. I've used it on guitar and it sounds great! But these days, it lives in my bass pedalboard, and it sounds fantastic for adding some edgy grit. So, I just finshed adding a true bypass circuit, so now when the pedal is off, the signal completely bypasses all of the circuitry. It passes straight from the input to the output jack. It's much better this way, so now I will get close to zero signal loss when it's off. I also just added those beautiful, bright LEDs. The green one shows when it's on, and yellow is for switching the "De-caf/Caf" switch to full on "Caf"! In the normal "De-caf" mode, you can adjust the distortion gain from mild to pretty wild. But, kick it into "Caf" mode, and it um...goes to 11! 😎

AJ's Musical Instrument Repair