One of the best-equipped luthier workshops in all of Australia
The Brisbane Guitar Repair Clinic is a fully fledged luthiery and one of the best-equipped guitar repair workshops in the country.
Our multitude of machines coupled with Ray’s knowledge, ability and experience have made us one of the country’s most sought-after services for discerning guitar owners who insist on only the highest quality of servicing and repair.
Take a look around the workshop to see how the magic unfolds.
The Bench
This is the operating table where most of the everyday work happens, including setups, fretwork, cleaning, wiring and fine-tuning playability.
This bench has seen countless thousands of guitars over the years, from learner instruments to timeless classics and gigging workhorses. You can see by the cushioned surfaces that Raymond treats every guitar with the utmost respect and reverence, as if it were his own.
Belt Sanders
We have three belt sanders, each used for their own specific purpose.
One is for sanding fret boards to attain a perfectly level surface and accurate radius, to enable precision re-fretting.
Another is used primarily to sand the bottom of bridge saddles for adjusting string action, and to make new saddles when, once again, accuracy is paramount.
The third sander is a general use sander, which we mainly use on metal parts.
Buffing Machines
Of our two buffing machines, one is solely used for polishing fret boards and frets after leveling, crowning and sanding, to achieve an absolutely blemish-free mirror finish. Smooth, polished frets mean perfect note clarity and buttery bending.
Our other buffing machine is a double-headed unit that rotates a little slower, which we use for buffing the paintwork of necks and bodies to a shiny gloss after repairs.
Overhead Router
This one’s a real monster, designed to stand up to the rigors of production manufacture – but we tend to use it to precision-route bridge saddle slots and pickup cavities. It also shines with custom-shaped pickguards and other machining, although one-offs can take a considerable amount of set-up time.
Lathe
This one harks back to Raymond’s background in engineering, and it’s something that you probably won’t find in any other luthiery.
We use this machine surprisingly often to make small parts that may have become unavailable, or to create plugs and dowels to fill stripped screw holes or for replacement bridge mountings.
Spray Room
This room is one of only a few fully ducted, exhaust-filtered spray rooms in the country. In its heyday, this room would be pumping out new bodies and necks finished in both nitro and poly.
But nowadays, since cutting down on the number of total refinishing jobs we do, we use this room when reapplying colour-matched finish to repaired necks and headstocks and a few custom paintjobs for my “Sundown” building projects continuing on with the tradition of finely crafted boutique instruments of the days of Kinman Blueprint and Icon Guitars.