Another vintage Yamaha found its way to me, I was pleased that it was not a C40. Don't get me wrong, a Yamaha C40 is an adequate classical guitar, often not bad at all. But often not good. This G65-A (serial 31109517 - 0426423 so probably 1983) is in good condition, doesn't look like it has been played much. I whipped the few remaining strings off it and checked the fret level and neck angle, all was okay. Well, neck angles always seem out once a classical guitar is 20 years old, but we make do.
I ran a block with sandpaper across the frets and it did not take very long before it was touching everywhere. I barely needed to put my fret file on it. Note: my latest fret file is nice, the one with the wooden handle, but the profile is too deep and was barely touching the frets. I am going to have to splurge on a decent fret file.
There were no sharp fret ends! I think it is because the manufacturers tapped in frets already cut to size with pre-finished ends...and they are slightly too narrow! It feel like that's not great because you lose a bit of fretboard at the edge. I want every bit of my fretboard to count. I reckon it is better to put the frets in and then sand them flush to the fretboard edge.
After polishing all the frets and giving the fretboard a heavy oiling, I decided to replace the nut. The existing one was pretty awful. I had already bought a bag of standard classical bone nuts a while back, and they are a perfect fit. Well, other than sanding the bottom down a few millimetres to get the nut height right.
The saddle was not the worst saddle I've ever seen, but, yikes, comes close! A cheap plastic one, and so thin! I've never seen a saddle so thin, I was tempted to open up the saddle slot a bit more to fit a bone saddle in, but, nah. A little too much effort for this calibre of guitar.
Restrung it up, it sounded okay. Marginally better than your average C40. It has the usual G string resonance nastiness when you dig in, so many classical guitars have that. I reckon that is your first test with a classical guitar. Pluck the G string hard, does it have a tedious resonance that grinds your ears - and does it sound a bit out of balance with the other strings? Otherwise this guitar has a good bass, the mids are bolder than I was expecting, and the trebles are adequate. It is not the worst vintage Yamaha I have played.
It is a cheap model, that's for sure, marginally up from my G-55A. For starters it does actually have a solid wood (rosewood?) fretboard, and a solid bookmatched soundboard (cedar?). The rest of the body is all veneer, so quite cheap, and no attempts to bookmatch the back or sides. Although the back is interestingly pretty though, I mean veneer is still wood, just a really thin sheet of wood, I'm guessing this is an example of rotary peeled veneer. At least the veneer is not on a backing of MDF, it looks to be on some sort of (probably) laminated cheaper wood.
 As found |
 Fret tool not quite right sadly |
 New nut installed, compared with old |
 Interesting veneer back |
So overall it came up okay, sounds okay, and it is pretty, so ready to go back to its owner.
Here is my standard test song, raw from the microphone.
