Cleaning and Restringing the Tenor Guitar

I got this tenor guitar off of the dump a few months ago.  I've wanted a tenor guitar for awhile now and to get one that's vintage for free, well, that's a pretty big score.  Tenor guitars became popular when tenor banjos became unpopular.  Tenor guitars were made so that a banjo player could still play in bands that were decreasingly interested in having a banjo in their group.  It is tuned the same as a tenor banjo.  While you can tune it to lots of alternate tunings, the most popular for this instrument are CDGA and, like a mandolin and fiddle, GDAE.  I decided to restring it and clean it up a bit.

The strings go into the tailpiece, pictured below.  I hadn't seen one like it before.

Loop end strings.  That's another new one to me.  From what I understand, very similar to the tenor banjo.  My wife and I had to search a bit to find loop end guitar strings.  Ultimately, we had to special order them from England.

 As you can see below, it has a cover piece that slides over the loop ends.  Took me a minute to figure that out.

Whenever I change the strings, I also scrub the fretboard - especially if I don't know who has been playing the instrument.

The picture below is a good representation of why I always scrub the fretboard.  

I noticed a few cracks.  Nothing horrible, but I'll have to keep an eye on it.

A bit of cleaner.  I used to oil the fretboards of my guitar with bore oil for brass instruments.  I need to get more, especially in the dry climate of Colorado.

I usually leave this much play when winding the strings.  You want a bit wrapped around the stem of the tuners.

There were lots of options for spacing.  It took me a few tries to see what worked best for the guitar and my fingers.

The bridge is a floating bridge.  The intonation is a bit out and I'm wondering if the floating bridge is set up incorrectly.

Slight separation where the neck meets the body.

If I want to keep this guitar (I think I do, it plays and sounds great), I'm going to have to sink some money into it.  The intonation is out, the tuners need work (falls out of tune) and it has a few separations.  I want to find a good luthier in the Denver area and have it fixed right.  It's a beautiful guitar.  My estimate is that it was made somewhere between 1920 and 1950.  There are no markings on or in the guitar.  

I'll keep you posted.

MOH