My friends brought this Hagstrom in that he’d picked up as a doer upper. He wasn’t sure if it had been a II or a III but it was clear it had a lot of work done to it in its life. It needed a re-fret, a new nut, the none original bridge fitting correctly and some general love.
Levelling the board proved tricky as the “H” truss rod wasn’t very effective at straightening the neck, in fact it was pretty useless. To get to a level playing field I had to be pretty aggressive with the board, the trade off being that at some points it was very thin. The problem occurred when fretting as in some parts the board collapsed in the middle, maybe on three or four frets. What at first looked bad wasn’t even really noticeable once it had strings on, and there was not other option I could think of to achieve a solid re-fret.
The original bridge had long since gone and I needed to do a little work to get the Tunematic bridge working right, including installing the correct posts and fitting new saddles.
The neck on this guitar is probably one of the thinnest I’ve ever come across and I wasn’t sure how I’d get on with it once it was done, turns out I got on with it quite well.
