Removing a Pickguard from a Taylor Acoustic

Taylor 150e, with and without pickguard

I hate Taylor pickguards. I have a 150e 12-string that sounds great, but I find no joy looking at it. I have never removed an acoustic pickguard before (but I have removed a headstock laminate), but I thought I'd look into it. It looked pretty thin, so I thought a little heat might do it.

And indeed it did. The only tool required was a hair dryer on high heat, low speed. (I should probably add the disclaimer here: do NOT use a heat gun. Assume that nothing good will come of that.)

Lifting a heated corner to check for "tan lines" before removing the whole pickguard

I held the hair dryer about two inches above the pickguard, heated one end of the pickguard and lifted it to check for tan lines, but there were none. I never leave the guitar out of the case, so the finish hasn't faded much at all. If you've had your guitar a while, you might see a noticeable difference between the finish where the pickguard was and where the rest of the finish faded.

Holding the hair dryer a couple of inches above the surface

After that, I heated the rest, slowly moving the dryer back and forth and very slowly lifting the pickguard with my other hand. Start to finish, the peeling part took about a minute or so. I was glad to see that no adhesive remained on the surface of the guitar. It was all stuck to the back of the pickguard.

Goop on the back of the pickguard

So that was a quick job, and it looks a lot better to me. I ordered a Yamaha pickguard to put on it, because I really like the looks of those. If that doesn't fit, I'll leave it as is.

Line 6 Duoverb Head: Is Everything Glued?

I will start by admitting I was not successful at fixing this amp. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be, and I told my customer that I am not set up to diagnose or repair modeling amps or anything else that is mostly surface mounted components (which are tiny). But I said I'd take a look anyway. I always learn something, and this time was no exception, so I am sharing in case anyone else runs into the same problems I did.

To remove the chassis from the cab, I removed the four usual bolts—one near each corner of the top of the cabinet. The chassis didn't budge, so I removed the four bolts from the handle. That usually isn't necessary, but these handle bolts were indeed attached to the top of the chassis. The chassis still did not budge. There were no other bolts to remove, so after tugging a bit by hand and triple-checking that there were no other bolts, I got a putty knife and gently pried the chassis from the cabinet. That worked, and the reason it was so difficult to remove became apparent when I removed the chassis from the cabinet. In addition to the six bolts, it had been secured with a couple spots of glue.

I ran into a similar problem with the knobs. I didn't want to destroy any pots by pulling too hard on the knob, so I did a quick search to see if Line 6 also puts little dabs of glue on their knobs. I found a lot of forums saying that Line 6 knobs are difficult to get off, but none saying that they were glued, so I tried some pliers and a piece of plastic tubing to protect the finish (see Fig. 1 below). I put the tubing around the narrow part of the knob, gently rocked the knob back and forth a few times then pulled and they all came off with no problem.

Normally, when pot knobs are hard to remove, you would put something on the faceplate to protect it, then use a couple of small screwdrivers—one each side—to pry them off. However, most of these knobs were flush with the surface of the faceplate. I could have just fit a razor blade under them, but that would have damaged the surface.

So if you have the misfortune to work on one of these amps, the chassis does come out and the knobs do come off. Just be careful in both pursuits.