After more than 25 years, a favorite old friend comes home with a little help from Facebook!

We have a love/hate relationship with Facebook around Chicago Fret Works. But one of the great things about the site is how it helps old friends reconnect. In this case, the two old friends are a 1978 Washburn Falcon and its original owner.  It’s one of those “I never should have sold that guitar” stories that actually has a happy ending. Continue »

Well obviously this is a custom refin (not done here) and obviously it looks more like a Tele Custom than a Tele Deluxe, but it’s pretty cool looking either way!

Somewhere along the line, this Tele was modded with a Bigsby and a wide-range humbucker. The current owner liked the guitar overall, but not the sound of the neck pickup. So we installed a Lollar Special T in the bridge position and a Lollar Imperial humbucker in the neck position. Because of the smaller size of the new neck pickup, we mounted it in a chrome pickup bezel and it looks great. I find it hard to look away from this orange soda/dreamsicle-looking guitar.

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Hold on there! Refinish a vintage Gibson? In candy apple red?? There better be a darn good reason to do something like that… and there was.

As mentioned in previous posts, the guitar repairman’s rule of thumb with vintage instruments is to leave it in as close to original condition as possible while still maintaining its playability. In the case of this 1960’s Gibson ES-355TDC, a couple of previous repairs have left it far from its original condition. When it arrived, the most obvious change was that it had been painted white years earlier and that white finish was flaking off in big chunks. A little closer look revealed a headstock repair the likes of which we’ve never seen. Throw in some long ago water damage, cracks in the body, and stains in the wood and the vintage value of the guitar is pretty well gone. You may as well paint it blue; or as the owner of this guitar decided, candy apple red. Continue »

Rewiring a jack on a vintage Gibson hollow body isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

A good customer of ours recently purchased this Gibson ES345, a beautiful and rare guitar, but one that just wasn’t sounding right. When it came to us, there was so much scratching and static that it was difficult to tell which or how many components worked. He also wanted to convert the stereo output jack to mono. Wired in stereo, each pickup is wired to one side and a typical guitar cable would only allow us to hear one of those. You either use a stereo splitting cable, sending each pickup’s signal to a different amp input, or you change a single wire at the jack and convert it to mono like most guitars. That’s easier said than done in this case however. Continue »

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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Okay Blueshawk fans, we know what you’re thinking; there’s no such thing as a Blueshawk bass. Well, thanks to a tag-team effort, there is now. This was truly one of the most challenging electronics customization projects we’ve ever done and it turned out great. **Beware** though, this one gets technical!

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One of the guitar instructors from the Old Town School of Folk Music came to us with an interesting idea. He performs solo with an acoustic guitar and stomps his foot to create a sort of woody bass drum effect. He wanted us to help him design an amplified box that he could plug-in so the volume of his foot taps could be balanced with the rest of his sound. The final product is so simple it cracks me up;

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I met a young blues player named Weston when I was doing guitar repair at the Chicago Guitar Center. After years of fighting the long scale length of an old Peavey guitar, he discovered a better fit in the 3/4 size Squier Mini and Ibanez Mikro guitars. We helped Wes supercharge both guitars by replacing the stock pickups with new ones and simplified string changing by installing Planet Waves Auto Trim tuners. We set both guitars up to his custom specs and his playing has been improving ever since. So much so that he made an appearance at Chicago’s recent Blues Fest. Continue »