Old Epiphone, Computer Life, and where I am with Technical Support. First blog.

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Today I decided to start blogging. Now, let's not be silly here, I've been a part of gaming culture since the early 80's when I owned 2 Atari systems, and was fascinated by Coleco-Vision, and computer gaming systems of the time. However, my parents thought transformers, GI-Joe, Star-Wars and other such action figures were more designed for the engineering prowess of an 8 year old child who received many electrical gadgets and promptly took them apart to find out how they worked. Fair enough. As such, I did not receive my first computer until 1997, my very own custom built DX2-66 with a Sound Blaster card, 2MB of 30pin SIMM memory, and a video card that played Diablo and World of Warcraft without much issue.

Now that the boring bio is out of the way, I have been building and fixing computers since that day. Because of my parents wisdom of keeping a $3000 computer system out of the hands of a very curious child, I promptly broke my first PC by trying to find out how it worked. I had no idea what a BIOS was, or what it was doing on my computer. I took it to a local repair guy who after noticing I was good-looking, smart, and curious in the ways of computing systems of the day....decided to hire me for $5.00 an hour under the table to learn how to build and fix computers. So, since 1997 I have built over 300 computers, fixed several thousand machines, refreshed thousands more, recertified, rebranded, and every "re" you can think of. After many years of technical support, I finally figured out the average layman hates computers, and thusly so did I. I also cannot stand the people who call with the most googlistic questions on the planet, meaning..."LOOK IT UP YOURSELF YOU LAZY FOOL!" and I got out of technical support fairly recently. Besides that, no one wants to pay someone who can be replaced with an AI prompt, and no one in this day can live on $19.00 an hour, especially at my age and experience.
So now I sit in my shop, looking at a 1960's era Epiphone 12-string guitar in for repair, reading Ted Woodford's blog, ordering 3in #8-32 machine screws to fix a very old neck that needs an upgrade to strengthen the neck heel joint to the body so it will hold tension for the very light 46-10 set of 12-string D'Addario I have in store for it, and not pull loose from the pocket. The owner of this wonderfully old Japanese built instrument has let it sit in a very thin case, with 10/12 strings under tension, for 25-30 years. I must say it has held up remarkably well considering, however, the action at the 12th fret is a dismal 6mm @ Low E and 4.5mm at the B strings.

You can see what I am dealing with. However, thank goodness for the Epiphone guys hindsight to make this a bolt on neck in all its glory. 4 3in wood screws from the 60's are all that is needed to remove this neck from the body, and see the tiny piece of card stock paper that was used as the shim to get the neck angle.

Neato!

I ordered the screws, and spoke with the owner. I don't foresee any real issues with the modification. *knocks on wood*