If You Axe Me Guitar Repair

Guitar repair shop located in Lake City, FL serving Columbia County and surrounding areas.

Visit our Blog

About Our Shop

I am located in southern Columbia County, south of Lake City, Florida. Our shop is 1200 sf of woodworking and finishing equipment, which is now being used more exclusively for guitar repair. As is the case with guitar work, there are many specialized tools which are essential to different repairs. Some of these are built in the shop as need arises, and some are purchased, because good ideas don’t care who has them, as long as someone is willing to put them to work. Guitars in progress reside in a small heated and air-conditioned work room, to protect them from the wild swings of North Florida weather. The nature of guitar repair requires patience and a willingness to invest time and sometimes cash, in order to secure whatever may be needed for a particular repair. People don’t repair cheap guitars, and handmade wooden instruments present many challenges as the repair surgeon first diagnoses, and then repairs each patient.

Read more...

How Much Will This Cost?

Great question. We have a price list which is a guideline for the most common repairs and maintenance work, but a hands on examination of an instrument is necessary to determine actual cost. The more involved the repair, the more opportunity for unseen surprises to materialize and increase the cost. Sometimes, the patient needs to be kept overnight for observation to get a correct diagnosis. We will always try to present what we call the “Big Picture” approach to this work. For example, a guitar is brought in with the complaint of “high action”. Sometimes a simple setup will fix this. Sometimes the saddle can be lowered to help the action. In other cases the neck may need to be removed and reset to correct the problem. In those cases, many times the bridge has been planed down to avoid having to reset the neck, such that when the neck is reset, we recommend replacing the bridge with a new one to give the guitar as much new life as possible. It is not unusual to find that the frets have been dressed down so often that they need to be replaced. A new nut and saddle are often needed as well.

We want to be informed repairmen before we start work on your instrument, but it is just as important that you are an informed customer, and that you understand the “Big Picture” regarding what your instrument may need. The goal is that you get to enjoy playing your guitar. Our job is to do whatever it takes so you get to do that.

Read more...

Setup and adjustment

This area of work is the most common of all. High quality instruments are designed to be worked on as they age, some more than others. Adjusting neck relief, leveling frets and re-crowning them, and correcting nuts and saddles, are often the keys to making a difficult to play instrument a joy to play again, without major deconstruction and rebuilding.

Get a Quote

Restoration and Refinishing

Sometimes a repair (due to the type of damage) creates the need for finish repairs. We can do just enough to touch up the existing finish, or in some cases, completely refinish an instrument. On certain vintage instruments, discretion must be used if an old finish is original and has not been disturbed. Otherwise, it is entirely the discretion of the owner, with our professional opinion as well, as to whether or not a guitar gets a new finish. We prefer to use nitrocellulose lacquer for all our finish work, because it is a serviceable and repairable finish.

Contact Us

Shop Talk And Stories

I have made valiant efforts over the years, as I have worked on different instruments, to document the work with photographs. In this section you can read stories of some of the repairs we have done and see pictures of how we did them. Eventually this will include video as well. Welcome to the front lines!

Visit our Blog