Nik Rajkovic / news@whmi.com

Hartland native Ryan Schuermann recently had the honor of restoring an acoustic guitar belonging to Beatles front man John Lennon, which was later auctioned for a record $2.86 million.

“They wouldn’t tell me whose it was until I signed all the paperwork and stuff. It was kind of wild,” said the owner of LA Guitar Repair in Sherman Oaks, California.

The Hartland High School grad explained to WHMI News the restoration was pretty simple, a neck reset to make it playable again.

It wasn’t until after the paperwork was signed Schuermann learned it was used on the “Help!” album. He looked up pictures online to confirm the back story.

“All those pictures come up with him playing it in the movie. That’s when it became a much bigger deal than I initially thought it would be.”

Schuermann says he works on about 1,000 guitars each year.

One was Robbie Robertson’s guitar for a number of years. The “wildly famous” double-neck Gibson guitar used in the 1978 film “The Last Waltz,” he said.

Schuermann says he’s played guitar since he was 9 or 10, playing in a few high school bands before heading to Boston in 2001, where he attended Berklee College of Music for a couple of years.

“Came out to L.A. and studied lutherie in basic guitars. So, I guess I’ve lived abroad longer than I lived in Michigan now,” he says.

After working at Fender, he created LA Guitar Repair in 2014.

“Luck doesn’t really have much to do with it. It’s really about hard work and making that choice. If you want to go do something, you just go do it. You put in hard work and it can happen for sure.”

Listen to the full interview on WHMI's Viewpoint Sunday morning at 8:30a.