A great reason to check out estate and garage sales. You never know when you’ll find a 1950’s Epiphone Devon archtop for a song!

Here’s a project with humble beginnings that grew into a full vintage restoration. The owner picked up this very old Epiphone Devon at an estate sale (along with several other groan-worthy items I won’t even tell you about.) It had been rather sloppily stripped and refinished and the binding had entirely peeled off. Initially, we planned only to add the binding to the body and unfortunately didn’t bother to take pictures. So the photos here begin after the new binding was already in place, when the owner decided he’d like it completely refinished to look like it did originally. It was a good decision.

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When it rains it pours, and my partner Dan has been up to his elbows in binding repairs this year.  Here, he replaces the dried and crumbling binding from a vintage Gretsch Country Gentleman.

A common problem on vintage Gretsch guitars is the decay and crumbling of the outer celluloid binding strip. Sometimes, owners will opt to leave the cracked binding alone, but in this particular guitar’s case, the owner wanted it repaired. In areas, it was loose enough to be scraped off with a fingernail and in others it needed to be scraped and even chiseled off. We ended up replacing the outer layer entirely, then touching up the nitrocellulose finish.

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This tale may ruffle the feathers of vintage purists. Would you rout a 50’s Harmony archtop for a pickup?

As a rule, we and others in our profession have an unwritten standard that says you don’t do irreversable modifications to vintage guitars unless you absolutely have to. But there are times to interpret those rules strictly and times to be a bit more loose. Refinish your ‘56 goldtop Les Paul in purple? Not here. Rout a ‘61 Strat for EMG humbuckers? No chance. Install locking tuners on your pre-war Martin? Keep shopping.

Install a humbucker in an acoustic Harmony Monterey archtop that you got for a couple hundred bucks? Hmmm… maybe…

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Sometimes braces come loose inside guitars as they grow old and dry out. When there’s a big circular soundhole to reach through, those repairs are easy enough. But in this guitar’s case, there are a pair of slender F holes and one brace that’s come completely out. The only way to get it glued back into place is to remove the entire back. Doing that to a guitar made in the early 1940’s means opening up a time capsule that hasn’t been seen by anyone since it left the factory. Continue »