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Permalink Reply by Tom T on June 28, 2016 at 3:06am

How you approach it depends to a great extent on your desire to save the body. If you don't care about the body, then you can just cut it away.

If you want to "remove" the neck from the body, then you should check YouTube for "Acoustic Guitar Neck Reset".

Removing a glued in neck so that the neck angle can be reset is fairly advanced stuff, buy you should be able to use the same technique to release the glue and remove the neck.

Basically, it involves removing the fret closest to the neck/body joint, then drilling a small hole through the fret board so you can use a small tube/needle to feed moisture (preferably steam into the area of the neck/body joint. The glue is usually a reversible type such as hide glue and the moisture will soften it. Takes some time and patience, but it is doable.

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Permalink Reply by Jesse Lively on June 28, 2016 at 6:41am

I won't be putting the neck back on that guitar so i might just try cutting it out, but thank you for the informative post I will check out some of those videos aswell!

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Permalink Reply by Mark on July 12, 2016 at 6:46am

If you want to use steam that is all you want put in there it's the heat that softens the glue.

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Permalink Reply by JL on July 13, 2016 at 3:41am

I watched a youtube on removing glued on bridges and fingerboards, the lutier masked off the rest with towels and aluminum foil and used a heat lamp to warm up the parts of interest.

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on June 28, 2016 at 5:13am

You may also want to look through the soundhole to see if the neck is screwed into the neck block with two screws or bolts. If so, your job will be much easier.

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Permalink Reply by Jesse Lively on June 28, 2016 at 6:34am

I just looked for those now, no such luck, haha.

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Permalink Reply by Taffy Evans on June 28, 2016 at 12:43pm

Hi Tom, here's what I did recently. I had the luxury of a bandsaw to do the job.

Cheers Taff

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Permalink Reply by Tom T on June 28, 2016 at 1:00pm

Nice removal and good use of the heel. It also shows the "V" slot that has to be un-glued to remove the neck from the body. As can be seen, it is not a simple job to get enough moisture into this joint to soften the glue. I guess guitar techs get upwards of $600 for a neck removal and reset. Now I know why.

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Permalink Reply by Taffy Evans on June 28, 2016 at 1:27pm

The hole through the fingerboard and pumping in steam method works if you know where the dovetail joint is. Not all manufactures use the same methods or size of dovetail to fit their necks. I have just removed a Gibson neck and its completely different to the one in that pic. 

Taff

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Permalink Reply by Tom T on June 28, 2016 at 1:47pm

I figured that only high-end guitars that were well documented qualified for such a complex procedure. Point being the shape of the joint on a particular guitar would be know to those qualified to do the work.

You must know a good bit if you removed the neck from a Gibson. How did you proceed with the removal. We all could benefit from the knowledge.

Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Taffy Evans on July 17, 2016 at 12:38pm

Hi, not all completely the case Tom. Some owners guitars mean a lot to them and will pay for high priced repairs on a relatively low priced/old guitar, mainly for sentimental reasons. In these situations one could find a regular dovetail of varying sizes, a plain tenon joint, a tenon joint with dowels down the sides of the  of the glue line as a key, Butt joint with dowels, concealed screws, and even nails added as reinforcement. I believe Stradivari used nails at one time.

Mentioned above was to remove the fret at the body joint 14 fret, the one to remove is the fret that sits over the end of the dovetail. When steaming keep in mind that other areas close by, like sides and neck block, may also be unintentionally loosened.

It's what keeps the job interesting Taff

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