Does it happen to anyone else?

It's a steal guitar. I stole it!

I used to work in a music store. I've seen a lot. It's sad what happens to some guitars.

 

It's a shame, but even with the right strings and precautions, many guitars still need neck resets and bridge repairs just due to the nature of the glues used and how they age. 90% or old Kay archtops need neck resets, even if they were closer queens with no strings on them, but yeah, it's sad to see what people do with vintage guitars, and don't even get me started on amps....

 

Make him trade it for a Tele.
He'll thank you for the rest of his life.

~ ST

 

You should know the rule by now, pics or it didn't happen!

 

Is it just the design of the headstock with the slotted tuning
or is there more to the string switch?

 

No truss rod to give stiffness to the neck either.

I know some electrics don't have truss rods, but at least the necks are (nominally) engineered to take the extra tension.

 

For me its not a question of why someone would do this to a guitar - people do stranger things when they think they're saving money. To me what is odd is that someone thinks this is repairable. Just looking at is should tell them that it has major problems. Ah, well...like the other poster said, point them at a Tele. It doesn't even have to be an expensive one. They'll thank you.

 

Its the age old thing of, "hey I got a guitar, will you teach me to play it?". So you put together a number of pages of chords and theory with some easy songs for them to play to practice. You see them a few weeks later and ask how it is going and they tell you they practiced for a few minutes and did not get any better so they quit...

Some people really have no idea of what a musical instrument needs or any idea of how to go about making music with it.

 

I am not surprised that this thing of putting steel strings on a classical is an issue. For a non-player who wants to put strings on, they may only see that their guitar has six strings and that the set of strings they bought had six strings in it.

One store who sells records, and sometimes instruments, tuned up a five string acoustic guitar bass low E to high B but I told them about the excessive tension over time and that they should tune it low B to G instead which they now have it at.

 

Two weeks later...

Hey, I took your advice and bought one of them Telecaster geetars and a geetar amplifier. I found a pack of the strings that came with my busted classical geetar so I strung up my new Tele with 'em.

Problem is, I can barely hear the bottom three strings when I play and can't hear a dang thing from the top three. I think my Tele must be broken.

 

True, but there's plenty of idiot snake-oil salesmen who clog the airwaves with enough bad advice/ideas and sell it good enough to lull the uninitiated into their own stupid foibles. I work on water wells and have seen my share of idiots who looked up 'how to do this repair' on the interwebs and got themselves into serious trouble.

 

So Kfan and his gang are up to their usual exploits.