Howdy, everyone. I hope you all are doing well. I have been on leave for 2 weeks now and I'm loving it in spite of the fact that we have had 25 straight days of RAIN. Well, I decided that I needed a new guitar strap. Nannette found this Dunlop from Music123 dot com. It should be here by Saturday via standard Fedex shipping. I'm going to put it on my Yamaha FG-460S that I've had since 1986. That guitar has been my "old faithful" ever since I bought it from Bills Music House in Catonsville, MD. It's showing its age, though. The fretboard has craters under a few of the strings from all the use over the years and a couple of the frets need replacing. I'm not going to worry about the craters since they don't really affect the playability but the worn frets are becoming a small problem. Back during my first deployment on USS McCandless, I had to remove the second fret and rotate it around 180 degrees because the high E string buzzed. It must have worked because that was 18 years ago and it's just now showing that it needs to be fixed properly so I didn't do too bad.
My Guild D25-12 has major problems now. With all the heat and humidity experienced during my last "Persian Excursion" during the first 6 months of 2005, the bridge has started to lift causing the top to go "belly up". I found an ingenious remedy from JLD called the Bridge Doctor and it comes recommended by several luthiers. It must be really good because the Breedlove guitar company installs it in every one of their guitars. I ordered one from Stewart-MacDonald luthier supplies tonight and it should be here by next weekend... maybe.