Saturday, June 25, 2011














Here's an interesting repair done recently at the shop.
It's an old Epiphone Caballero. The original bridge on this guitar was made from plastic and attached to the top with little lag screws. We decided that replacing this with a solid rosewood bridge glued to the top would not only make the guitar more playable but would also improve the sound of the instrument.
Once I got into it, I found that one of the top braces needed to be repaired.
The owner also wanted a Fishman Rare Earth sound hole pickup with an endpin jack installed.
Greetings to all,

My name is Mick Donner. I joined the ranks here at Guitar Repair of Tampa Bay a little over a month ago when we were still headquartered at Legends Guitars.
For those of you who don't already know me, I've been repairing and building instruments for about 30 years. In 1986, I joined the service department at Washburn where I designed the Washburn AB-40 and AB-20 acoustic bass guitars. I left Washburn in 1989 to take a job at Gibson for the next year. I worked at Peavey in Guitar R&D from 1990 to 1994 designing instruments and building artist guitars. I was involved in the design, building and development of the Midibase, Cyberbass, B Quad basses, and Cirrus basses as well as building personal instruments for several high-profile endorsees. In 1994 I became product manager for the guitar division at Peavey. I left Peavey in 1996 to become production manager for Parker Guitars. Ken was kind enough to let me help with the development of the Parker Fly Bass.
As Parker's fortunes worsened, I was downsized and was lucky enough to land the post at Dean guitars that Ben Chafin had just vacated. I was at Dean until June of 2006 when I struck out on my own working as a consultant to the Music Products Industry providing sourcing, design, artist relations, and technical writing services.
That sort of business is predicated on smaller companies having the resources to expand their business. The recession took care of that so I went back to playing, teaching and repair work.
Ben called me a couple of months ago just to catch up. I told him I was doing repair work in my garage so he asked if I'd like to join him in the shop at Legends. The rest is history.
I'm happy to be part of the Guitar Repair of Tampa Bay team. Ben and I seem to work well together and I look forward to serving the local community of professional and amateur musicians.

Sunday, June 19, 2011



Hey all you Dad’s out there, HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!!

We have been going through a lot of changes the past couple of weeks. The store where we did repairs, Legends Guitars, has closed after 10 years of service to the Tampabay guitar community. We have relocated the repair shop to the Chafin Custom shop over on Johns Road. We weren’t sure we were going to get everything in there but it looks like it is going to work out just fine. I think it will be kind of fun for people to see where we build! Feel free to stop by. Just give us a call first to make sure we are there because our hours vary.

Friday, June 17, 2011

WELCOME TO THE GUITAR REPAIR OF TAMPA BAY BLOG!!

This is where we will be posting some of our repair projects, guitar builds,
tips on maintaining your guitar and talking about all things with strings!
Stay tuned ;-).........