Ray+Sparks+Works+on+Our+Guitar

One of our pink Walmart guitars wasn't working; the strings were too close to the fingerboard and they were buzzing.

I took it to Ray Sparks for him to fix.



Ray takes the nut off the guitar (the white plastic thing between the finger board and the tuners). He cleans the excess glue out of the groove with his pocket knife. By the way, Ray is very knowledgeable about knives and his are always razor sharp.



The problem is that the nut is not high enough. Ray has a stack of cards of various sorts--business cards, and so forth--so he searches here to find one that would be the right thickness for a shim.

He cuts a shim from a Skip-Bo card and puts it beneath the nut to see if it was the right size. It's not--the strings will still buzz. Wait...there is a pack of batteries hanging here. Can you find them? Ray knows where everything is in his shop.





He cuts a shim from the battery pack. It is thicker than the Skip Bo card.



He tests it and it's good. He glues it in. But the strings are still buzzing. And Ray notices that the edges of the frets are really sharp. Someone could get hurt, so he sands them down. He also used various types of files. Ray says that the wood in the neck probably shrank and that's why the frets were sticking out on the edges.



He decides that we need to put a shim under the saddle of the instrument, where the strings go across a white plastic piece in the body of the guitar. He removes the bridge. It's in there tight!

He puts in a tiny shim and tunes up the guitar. It's STILL buzzing. Ray examines it and says that the neck has a raised area in it. He can't do it today, but he will take the frets out and sand down the neck.

There are three things that I have noticed about Ray that make him good at what he does. One is that he stays with a problem until he finds a solution. I was ready to give up after the two shims, but he is not. We will have a playable instrument because of Ray's commitment to fixing things. Secondly, I notice that Ray is really careful about putting things away so he knows where they are the next time. That helps him to find things quickly and not to get discouraged while he is making a repair because he can't find something. As we were playing music for Ray, he put away the scissors, files, pliers, and glue that he used in working on our guitar. Third, Ray looks at everything in his shop not just as a manufactured item with a certain function, but as a series of characteristics that can be used in other settings to solve a problem. A Skip-Bo card is not just an item from a children's game. It is thin, it is not useful if other cards are missing from the game, it can be easily cut to size, and because of the coating on the card, it will not soak up moisture in the air. It makes a good shim.