Guitar Repair Using an Inspection Camera

I've built a handful of guitars. And as a result, when friends of mine have trouble with their acoustics, as you can see, they tend to find their way here to see if I can help them out and get that fixed. So in this case, what we've got is a couple things. This one is rattling. Not good. Also when it was played, it had kind of a buzz to it. So I found that when I tapped on it, it really shouldn't be doing that rattle there. It's nice and solid on this side. So now my dilemma is, what I really need is to be about this tall so I can get inside there and look around and see what the problem is, see if I can fix it or not. So what I found is that inspection cameras like this one are very useful for this. Now the deal is, an inspection camera lets you put a probe down into a wall, some kind of a chase, any place where it's just too tiny for you to see. The probe has a lens on the end of it. There's a monitor here. And what that monitor does is show you whatever scary thing that is actually showing up on the end of this. Often come with different lengths of probes, lets you get in deeper if you need to. And with devices that let you bring things back out of where you are, hooks, magnets so that you can retrieve items if you need to. In my case, what I need to do is get inside the guitar body. What I'm going to have to do is shed a little light on the subject. So I'm going to turn the light on, there's a little LED on the end of this. Then what we can do with this cord is a couple of different things. I could send a signal to a television or a monitor so that in addition to this screen here, I could be viewing what I'm looking at on a bigger screen. What I'm doing here is I'm sending it to my laptop where I've got software in here that's going to record whatever it sees. And that's pretty cool because then when the repair is done I can go back and I can say, "Well, look, here you had a broken brace, ran a little video of it so you can see exactly what I had to do to fix it." So let's probe around inside here and have a look. These are pretty flexible so I'm going to form this pointing up so that I can have a look at the bracing. And, well there's a problem right there. There shouldn't be slivers of wood and there shouldn't be a shadow of a glue line there. So obviously a brace is completely separated from there. Let me poke around and see if I can find the brace, I'm sure that's what's rattling around on the bottom of the guitar. So there's the busted brace laying there upside down, not a good sign. So what's cool about this is that it gives me the opportunity to look inside the instrument, diagnose it, see what I've got. So it's a pretty handy way, in addition to its home inspection stuff where you might look inside a wall, a real handy way to look inside instruments like this guitar, diagnose what's going on, see what kind of problems they have, and see if you're going to be able to fix it or not.