Unwarping old neck

Building/Repair
1

Hello everyone!
First post here and excited to be a part of the community, in any case, lets do this!

So I’ve had a Nagauta shamisen for quite some time now and recently I lent it out to one of my students. Well I’m not exactly sure if they took my warnings to heart or just practiced a lot but when I got it back, I noticed that the sao was in the process of bending forward.
I really love this Shamisen and it is very sentimental to me, when your sao began aging and bending like this, was there anything you did? If I can’t fix it, can I buy a sao by itself? Is there something I can do for the old sao if I do need to replace it? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Sebastian Melendez
PS. I’ll post pictures when I get back to California.

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I don’t know the answer but I wonder if you could take it to be plek’d?

3

If by bending forward, you mean that the (very subtle) v shape of the neck is becoming much more apparent - then yes, it’s generally an easy fix.

Over time, the glue fastening the sao to the nakago (the spike that goes through the dou) weakens and can lead to the neck bowing forward.

The fix for this, generally, is to re-glue the joint after adjusting for the desired level of action. Sometimes additional work may be required to reinforce the position.

Kameya offers this repair on their website, and it’s fairly common elsewhere too.

https://e-kameya.com/repair/repair05.html

1 Like
4

However, if the cause of the bending is actual warping… that’s a bit harder to fix. But not impossible!

Kikuoka Nakamura talking about that subject above.

For further reading in Japanese, the terms you need to look for are:

ha-naoshi ハ直し
and
saonomagari 棹の曲がり

1 Like
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Thank you so much for both of your emails! Ill definitely check it out!