Grandpa's Airline Guitar

My freshman year at college I lived with Dad and taught myself to play guitar. Weeknights I unloaded trucks at Target where they cashed weekly paychecks. I bought the first thing my 19-year-old brain thought of: a red Squire Stratocaster electric guitar. Then I bought a 10 watt Marshall amplifier and a cord from a nice Mexican running a small music shop somewhere in Holland, MI. I ran home, fired up the Marshall, strapped on the Stratocaster and plugged in, excited. Now what do I do? I stood there a second and then plucked out a few inaudible, un-harmonic chords and cringed. It sounded like a creaking garage door. Nevertheless, my music career was underway.

I started downloading guitar tabs and playing them in the basement next to Dad’s office (much to his chagrin, I'm sure). One day he brought over from the utility room Grandpa’s Airline acoustic guitar, which was sitting next to a box of his childhood nostalgia, thinking that I’d appreciate it more now that I was a strummer myself. At 19, acoustic guitars weren't cool; but it was an old and interesting noise-maker, something I've been attracted to my whole life.

I looked it over.

Grandpa’s Airline guitar needed some attention but was overall in good shape. Corroded brass strings were strung over a rosewood fretboard and a blonde maple jumbo body and were plugged by ivory-white pegs into a rosewood saddle piece. Little vintage silver nuts tuned the strings on the black headstock adorned by an oval black and gold AIRLINE logo. In the guitar’s sound hole was the manufacturer’s label, reading, “AIRLINE, JAPAN,” with the name Ben Lafayette written across it in black permanent marker. I later guessed that Grandpa bought the Airline guitar used after he moved to Milton, Fl, because of the Cajun root of Ben’s last name. Nevertheless, it added character. I tuned up the old strings and strummed out G, D, and C chords I learned. An acoustic guitar was kind of cool.

But soon Grandpa’s Airline guitar broke. Unfinished wood dries then rots from the outside in. Wood is petrophilic and hydrophobic; water and dry air rots wood while oil and humidity preserves it. Tuning the guitar’s strings brought some long-forgotten tension on the saddle bride (the rosewood tailpiece that holds the strings to the guitar’s body), which on most tuned guitars range from 500-700 pounds of pressure. Within a year after receiving the guitar, the strings pulled up the saddle bridge from the guitar’s body, splintering through a couple layers (but not all) a hole in a perfect shape of the saddle bridge itself. I took it to two different renown luthiers and both basically said the same thing: The cost of the repair would exceed the guitar’s value and that considering its vintage, it would make a great wall guitar. Come to find, Airline was a mass-produced, popular novice guitar brand sold by Sears & Roebuck from the 50s to the 80s. They were generic; Kay, Harmony, and Silvertone all branded models built by the same manufacturer. However, time, solid wood and Japan manufacture would make the Airline guitar collectable and, to me, worthy of repair.

I was a bit saddened by the breakage and swore to fix it, one day, when I had the money. That day wouldn’t come soon, so I bought a chipboard case and stuffed Grandpa’s Airline guitar under my bed.

Bored one day, years later, I pulled the guitar out and admired its old beauty. The hell with it; let's try to fix it. Grandpa would probably want the guitar to be fixed or junked, and it was just an old worthless guitar being broke, and I would at least learn exactly what was wrong with it, and maybe how to fix it if I just tried. None ventured none gained. Curiosity compelled me on, encouraged me naturally, as it always had, to find out how and why something did or didn't work, like my urge to study Literature in college. What was the big deal about books hundreds of years old that people kept reading, didn't throw out, picked up again, and passed down? I pried at Grandpa’s old guitar like I did The Brothers Karamazov, like Ivan Karamazov did at thinking, Alexey Karamazov at love, Dimitri Karamazov at passion. God knows why I did.

I went to work. I took the strings off and ripped up as gently as I could the saddle, which took a few splinters with it by aged wood glue, slightly damaging some of the body’s surrounding finish. Underneath the saddle, the body’s wood was pretty dry and thin and rotted. I cut a piece of solid maple to a fit 45 degree joint beneath the saddle’s joint surface on the body from the inside of the guitar. I glued and clamped the piece underneath the damaged area through the sound hole. This re-enforced well the dry-weakened body wood, giving the guitar enough strength to hold tuned strings under heavy pressure once again, hopefully. Next, I sanded the underside of the rosewood saddle and glued it back into place using a high-bonded epoxy. Then I sealed the edges of the saddle to the body with the left-over epoxy. I clamped and cured it for 24 hours. The next day I re-drilled the six string holes, and, excited, I restrung Grandpa’s Airline guitar with new strings.

I tuned her up and strummed out a G chord: BUZZZZ! The action was way too low and the tuned strings rested across the metal frets along the neck of the guitar! With no way to adjust the bridge height, I was stumped. Oh well, I thought, always was worth a try.

I put the guitar down and cracked a beer. But I kept looking at it from the corner of my eye. For some reason it bothered me, it irritated me to find a way to fix the string height, to make the guitar playable. I couldn't stand its idleness, its triumphant idleness, getting the better of me then laying worthless in my apartment for another couple of years. I don't know if it was man's arrogance to power over nature or what, but I kept at it.

I picked it back up by the neck and inspected the bridge once again. The bridge is an elongated, U-shaped metal strip on the guitar’s body that the strings lay over; the nut is a strip of plastic that sits in the U-shape and under the string, acting as a kind of buffer between the two. If I could only raise these two up, I think that the guitar would work fine. But how? When the strings are detached from the guitar, plastic nut falls loose from the metal bridge. If I could wedge or place something between the two, the strings would raise and play better. I thought of shaping a piece of paper or cardboard?---that would probably work, but it could be lop-sided, causing the bridge and nut to be uneven or simply warp over time from being too soft. Imagination is a beautiful thing. I can see things before they happen; a dark movie theater encircles a lighted screen in my head where I see a matchstick, with its tip cut off, laid in the silver chrome of the U-shaped bridge where the plastic ivory nut would lay, acting as a spacer, raising the strings to a playable height. Then I jammed out a blues riff feeling no blues but the blues, poor times sans depression, ill, pain.

I grabbed a match, cut it and placed between the bridge and nut and then restrung and tuned the guitar. I strummed a G chord and Grandpa’s Airline guitar rung a harmonic wood-aged tone heard only from vintage guitars.

It was fixed!

No string buzzing, it kept in tune and played easy---it was like new. I couldn’t believe a matchstick was the crowning piece to making a 40-year-old guitar sound new. Laying underneath the bridge, by looking at it, no one could tell. It lived once again to boogie at one’s command, fiddle at one’s fingertips.

I ended up loving the guitar’s feel, so much so that dust piled on my new Guild guitar. It wasn’t so much that it sounded or played better than the Guild, but that it just felt better. Sometimes only what matters is what you feel.

       Thanks Grandpa, thanks Dad.