This is the acoustic guitar with which I started on my journey of being a self-taught guitar musician. It's an Ibanez model 62 that I bought second hand sometime in 1977.
This guitar had very bad action problems. If one tried playing anything too much beyond first position, fingering on the fretboard became very difficult and the notes and chords would start sounding grossly out of tune. So, for a lot of years, I was limited to just playing the standard 'cowboy' chords. At the time, I wasn't serious enough about playing guitar to take the instrument to a Luthier to have things fixed.
Around 2010, I acquired a new acoustic-electric guitar, so this old Ibanez got put in its case and relegated to storage.
In the meantime, I began learning how to do basic acoustic guitar setup and adjustment, so eventually I pulled the old beater back out to see if there was something I could do to make it play better.
I immediately discovered that the bridge was too tall, making the strings too far off the fretboard. That is why the action and intonation were so bad, and the guitar so un-playable.
I set about filing off the bottom surface of the bridge to shorten its height. I ended up taking off a full 1/8-inch of material to make it right. After re-mounting the bridge and putting on a new set of strings, all it took was a minor truss rod adjustment to make things sweet.
What a difference! Now the action is incredibly good all the way up the fretboard. As a result, I leave the guitar out with the rest of the collection and find myself picking it up to play quite often.
Cheers!
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