I am fully aware of that. The restoration of the guitar in this thread is completely uneconomic. But the guitar has an ideal value to me. Even given that, the repair of the thinline - i call it "Sorgenkind" ("problem-child") - is crazy, i know. Well, it sometimes is nice being crazy...Barry Daniels wrote:... A "cheap" archtop may not be worth this amount of work.
BTW: i am making good progress. I "only" need to cut a new mortise for the neck, free handed, of course, fill a few wounds in the bottom in order to get plane surfaces at the end blocks and glue in and trim the already fitted braces. (And probably make a new bridge or adapt the old one). If i am really lucky, the guitar will play again in February. But that's a good training for the next archtop build...
And the other one shown above? Question b) more or less points to stabilize it with the least amount of effort, which is just to make new braces and leave the top as it is now. But anyway it would be nice to learn if there is a possibility to do it better. (learning is alway nice...)