Air Harness
© Frank Ford, 4/24/98; Photos by FF, 1997
Well, this one may seem like overkill, but it really has gotten me through some tough reset jobs.
For a Martin guitar with an old, delicate finish it's nice to be able to remove the neck without damaging the finish with steam and hot water.
All Guild guitars, almost all Gibson guitars and many others have dovetails that are really tough to extract. They may be straight rather than tapered, ill-fitting or potted in a ton of glue. All of these jobs benefit from this rather elaborate companion to my regular reset neck pressing jig. With it, I can steam out a neck (even if it takes half an hour) with no chance of overheating the finish.
Here's how it goes: I bought a bunch of the snap-together coolant rigging that machinists use to pump air, water or oil onto parts as they're being worked. With my set of nozzles and y-connectors, I can squirt cold air onto all parts of the neck joint at once:
It's a little hard to see detail in this photo, but the blue sections are sections of tubing and the orange ones are either y-connectors, manifolds, or nozzles.
The nozzles come in different sizes:
There are even wide, flat nozzles that spray broad areas, although I like the flexibility of more individual ones.
I can pop sections together and move the nozzles anywhere I want.
In this setup I have ten nozzles covering the entire exposed joint edge on all sides:
This setup is light enough and rigid enough for me to pick the guitar up and handle it normally as I go through the steaming process. I could even shake it and the tubing would not shift position!
With 60 lb. of air continuously squirting away, the surface is absolutely cold, even right where the steam exits.
Only problem is that it takes the entire output of my Quincy 5-hp air compressor to feed this hungry rig.
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