100 Mile Guitar Tech

02/06/2025

100 Mile Guitar Tech is now closed. If you require emergency work for the month of February only, please DM and prepare yourself for F-U pricing. Thank you very much for letting me work on all of your wonderful guitars. Each one told a story to me and I appreciated meeting every one of you and helping you. Wishing you all the best on your musical journeys. Take care of this town and take care of each other. Bye-bye now.

-SK

12/03/2024

For the sake of full transparency: rates will be going up in the new year to meet the increased demand for my time and to keep the repair shop sustainable. Quotes will always remain free.

Thanks for an incredible first calendar year so far, for keeping me busy, and for letting me help you with your maintenance and repair needs.

11/09/2024

🎸🪕 $10 OFF INSTRUMENT SETUPS THIS NOVEMBER 🪕🎸
Thermodynamics are an absolute drag on your instrument. A guitar has many adjustable and moving parts, and when temperatures fluctuate or change those parts can and do fall out of adjustment. If you are asking questions like:

"Why won't my guitar stay in tune?"
"Why are the strings hard to press in places?"
"Why is there buzzing?"
"Why are things getting stuck?"
"Why is this loose?"
"What is that rattling?"
"Why do notes sound wrong the further I go up the fretboard?"

You need an instrument setup.

Your instrument should be a joy to play. Let's make that happen!

10/26/2024

$10 off all instrument setups this November!

Send a message to learn more

10/25/2024

Next month's special will be altered and expanded to include all fretted instruments. I would like to apologize to all of the local bassists, mandolinists, ukulele, banjo, and dobro players, 12 stringers, and djenters of 7 or more strings who may have felt left out.

Send a message to learn more

10/22/2024

AVAILABLE NOW: 2013 Squier Affinity Jazz Bass (Used)
-pre-ban rosewood fretboard
-Dunlop Straplocks
-Wilkinson brass saddles
-newly installed wiring harness with domed telecaster k***s
-genuine Fender thumb rest and pickup cover installed to give a vintage aesthetic
-fully set up with Ernie Ball Slinky 105's
-frets dressed, neck edges rolled
-includes Yorkville padded gigbag, Ernie Ball guitar strap, picks

$300

10/22/2024

Did another one of these electric conversions on a gorgeous matte Rex Burst Jim Dandy. This is the first to arrive in our small stock of gear and it sold privately and very quickly before I could even get these pictures. If you are interested in one of these builds for the holiday season: they start at $450 and I have limited space to do them in time for Christmas, so get your orders in. Congratulations, Tyler, on your new guitar!

(This particular set of options included art deco rotomatic tuners, strap buttons, a genuine Fender Stratocaster pickup, volume and tone controls, and upgraded metal hardware with a total price tag of $650)

10/21/2024

Free strings with any 6 string guitar setup this November.

Send a message to learn more

09/07/2024

Had a returning customer bring me their Gin Ricky for a gander. Gretsch’s Gin Rickys and Jim Dandys are neat little guitars with endless modding potential and a robust modding community, and the returning customer is a chill guy who shares my love of modding guitars so I was very excited.

I noticed the bridge had started to separate from the soundboard, a common issue on early models with these top-loading bridges, and suggested we install a tailpiece to alleviate tension on the bridge assembly. It would also cover a large cosmetic crack that the guitar previously incurred during a fall, improve sustain, and make the guitar easier to play. A logical next step to improve and ensure tuning stability was upgrading the cheap open gear 1:16 tuners to 1:18 sealed tuners. We went with tulip style tuning pegs to complement the tailpiece, and it was an absolutely stunning choice.
Lastly we felt the stock pickup didn’t pack much of a punch and lacked any sort of volume or tone controls. Knowing that my customer loves to play blues style music, I suggested we be bold and go with a full bluesbox conversion: strat pickup, master volume and tone controls with a .047 cap mounted directly to the soundboard.

The customer requested gold hardware with black plastic and the end result was breathtaking. I chose to string it up with 11-48 Power Slinky electric guitar strings for maximum bluesbox style. This little parlor guitar is now dripping with a Chet Atkins like mojo, but belts out a delta blues tone you’d have to hear to believe. This thing with a rubber bridge would make a river man cry, lord have mercy.

I had so much fun with this project I bought a Jim Dandy of my own to mod in a similar style. Stay tuned for that one!

Thank you, Kyle, for trusting me with your gear once again.

08/28/2024

Had this Washburn on the bench last week for a full overhaul of its pickup system. This is unfortunately a very commonly required repair on acoustic electric guitars in the low to medium price range due to several cost-saving decisions made on the production line.

The issue we faced here is that the pickup component is an exposed braided copper wire crudely jammed under the instrument’s saddle piece through a single hole drilled straight through the saddle slot in the bridge. Because the braided cable is always longer than the saddle slot it gets bent at its middle in this hole at a 90° angle. The braided wire frays under pressure at the harsh bend and eventually the pickup breaks entirely, whether you have been playing the instrument or not.

We replaced the original single band EQ Fishman iSys with a newly upgraded model featuring a 2 band EQ & tuner. Though this does leave them open to the same problem again when the pickup inevitably fails.

So I put on my modding hat…

During install I carefully and precisely drilled a second hole at a gentle angle on the opposite side of the saddle slot. This allows the exposed part of the wire to pass all the way through the saddle slot and incur the harsh 90°bend at a point where it is heavily reinforced and will not fray. It also allows the entirety of the pickup to lay completely flat against the bridge, maximizing the fullness of body and tone that you can get with an undersaddle piezo. It’s very noticeable, and I wowed many a live sound engineer across the country in my touring days with this mod on my own acoustic-electric.

After removal and reinstallation of the pickup system, the guitar received a full setup with 11-52 Earthwound 80/20 Bronze strings and a thorough detailing with MusicNomad products. I also used my MusicNomad nut files during the setup to remedy some strings binding in the nut. The guitar was then returned to an ecstatic owner.

Thank you, Country, for trusting me with your guitar!

08/24/2024

We will have a very small selection of modified guitars and some guitar effects pedals for sale in September. Stay tuned!

08/10/2024

12 strings can be a bit of a doozy. Very narrow string spacing, 24 points of contact for endless sitar potential, traditional string order vs the Rickenbaker method… but where some people see twice the problems, I see twice the fun.

This 2013 Fender 12 string acoustic-electric came to me after the owner tried to adjust the truss rod and unfortunately failed. Hey man, we’ve all either been there or have had nightmares of being there. It’s all good.

It was a bit dusty so I stripped the strings and started with the complimentary detail cleaning. The owner wanted to size up to medium gauge strings, so several nut slots had to be filed to accept the larger strings. After correcting the truss rod I got to work repairing the bridge assembly, which had been damaged by pliers during previous string changes. I adjusted the action at the saddle to accommodate for the heavier string gauge. I also polished his frets and refinished his fretboard after repairing several occurrences of fret sprout, a common issue with Fenders from the Chinese factory. There was some haze in the the headstock's polyurethane finish that could not be repaired. After checking his electronics and stretching out all 12 strings, this chimy songbird was returned to an ecstatic owner. As always, check the comments for before pics.

Thank you, Ian, for trusting me with your guitar!