When I was 12, my best friend Eugene got a guitar for his birthday.  Of course, right away I wanted one too.  Since all of this was happening in the Soviet Union, simply wanting a guitar did not mean that you could actually get it.  The default state of store shelves was “empty” – sometimes you had to wait months or even years to find what you were looking for.

In any case, I finally got a guitar a year later, for my 13th birthday.  I was ecstatic.  I spent days in my room, practicing until my fingers literally bled.

Over the years, this guitar traveled with me all over the former Soviet Union – camping trips, summer jobs as camp counselor and even a few real gigs. 

When I immigrated to the United States, I left this guitar with my mom.  In 1996, I went back to visit my family.  By that time, I had a few much better guitars waiting for me in my Norfolk apartment.  However, since the rest of my family was getting ready to immigrate to the US, I knew that they would not be able to lug my guitar with them.  I could not bear to sell or give away my guitar, so I brought it back with me.  Let me just say that lugging a guitar on a 14-hour flight is not a lot of fun. 

A few years later, the guitar stopped holding tune; it was time to replace the tuning pegs.  Unfortunately, it was impossible to find tuning pegs that would match the holes in the head stock of my Soviet-made guitar.  A local pawn shop (where I bought my other guitars) gave me a number of a guy that they claimed to use for musical instrument repairs.  Not knowing much about guitar repair, I trusted the guy who said that he could modify the head stock by filling the old holes and press-drilling new ones to match standard American-made tuning pegs.

A few days later the “repair guy” called me and gave me a long speech about how my guitar was a cheap Soviet-made toy and that the neck was made from soft wood and that it cracked as soon as he started drilling.  I picked up my guitar from the guy’s shop and was truly shocked by what he did.

He did not fill the old holes.  Instead, he used a hand-held drill or a Dremmel to widen the existing holes to accommodate larger tuning pegs.  The vibration of whatever tool he used for drilling cracked the head lengthwise.
When I came home, I broke off the cracked part of the head and re-glued the whole thing.  I did not attempt to fix the butchered holes and reattached the old broken tuning pegs back.

The guitar was unplayable, but it still carried quite a bit of sentimental value.  That is, until a few years later my sister dropped it and broke off the bottom part of the neck, right where it attaches to the guitar’s body.
For the next 10 or so years, I kept my first guitar in it’s old beat up case.

Over the past few weeks, after reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers (http://www.amazon.com/Makers-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765312794/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265424527&sr=8-1) I decided that it would be nice to do something with my hands.  When I was a kid, my grandfather had a woodworking shop in his basement and he taught me how to do everything from woodcarving to working a lathe. 

Since for the next few weeks I have a bit of a break in my photography business, I decided to spend my evenings restoring my fist guitar. 

Hopefully, I won’t destroy it completely.