This guitar was shipped to a well known  local performing musician and arrived with the headstock broken and twisted. I offered to repair it, describing it as a 'routine' repair. There was nothing routine about it.

The nature of the figured wood, the twisted break, and the thickness of wood between the tress-rod cavity and outside of the neck all conspired to make this one of the most difficult repairs ever.

The first gluing did not hold, the first failure in over 40 years of repair experience. In hind sight, it was the tress-rod thrust-washer bearing on the thin wood below it that caused the crack to re-open. Had I understood this to begin with, I might have proceeded differently.
The 'first go' slide show is shown below.

When the first gluing failed, I embedded two graphite stays into the neck, one on either side of the tress rod channel, to achieve acceptable strength. Even after this extensive and invasive repair, the crack moved a tiny bit when the tress rod was re-tightened.
Aha...

We contacted Gibson for a replacement neck but they said No, Hell No. I therefore had to innovate. The slide show below shows this process.

Gibson repair in Nashville also has a unique solution for this type of problem. They overlay graphite-epoxy to span the break. Also invasive...

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