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.

The Falcon was one of Washburn’s best electric guitar models with a neck-through-body design and a very comfortable back contour that helps for playing notes up high on the fretboard.The owner of this guitar bought it new in 1978 (looking something like the one below,) but sold it a few years later -a move he came to regret. It wound up in the hands of a touring professional who traveled the world with it for many years.

Fast forward to 2010, and the age of online social networking. The two men found each other on Facebook and decided the guitar needed to be back in the hands of its original owner. It arrived in our shop with a new candy-apple red finish job,  missing some of its old parts,  and in need of some TLC. But there was no mistaking that it was the same guitar in the same original case!

We installed a set of Lollar Imperial humbuckers, a set of Graphtech string saver saddles, a Black Tusq nut, and put it all back together.

Note that previously mentioned back contour above, along with a custom made clear plexiglass cavity cover (a removable protective film makes it looks a little cloudy.) The owner wanted to be able to see the ‘guts’ of his guitar.

This old Falcon looks and sounds terrific, but the best part for us was helping reunite a player and his favorite guitar after so many years.

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.

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.

Our original plan with this guitar was to strip off the old white paint and restore it to as close to original condition as possible – meaning refinish it in its original translucent cherry red color. But once the flaking paint was off, we saw that the headstock had been entirely rebuilt, with the new headstock made, curiously enough, out of plywood. There were also a great number of cracks in the surface layer of the laminated body. These cracks were likely the result of extensive water damage and could be the reason it was originally refinished.

The body cracks and flaws would be visible through any transparent color. We know because we tried it, even darkening the red color to try to hide the cracks. It just didn’t look very good.

So the owner called an audible and told us he’d just as soon have us paint it something flashier – candy apple red and while we were at it, could we add binding to the F holes. It was an unexpected color request, particularly since Gibsons were rarely finished in candy apple red, but one we felt was not out of line given the condition of the guitar. He loves the way this guitar plays and decided he wanted to love the way it looked too.

We began the new work by gluing white binding to the inside of the F holes. This guitar didn’t have binding , but plenty of other old Gibsons do, so it didn’t look out of place. It’s tricky and sticky work that takes time and patience.

Once the binding is in place we can sand the F hole areas level. Next we add a coat of white primer/sealer…

…and a couple coats of the sparkly candy apple red.

Before spraying clear top coats, Dan has to clean the red paint off the body binding and the black paint off the headstock and Gibson logo.

Next it’s time to top the finish with clear nitrocellulose lacquer. To get the finish smooth and glassy in appearance, Dan has to wet sand the clear top coats up to 1200 grit sandpaper before buffing out the whole guitar (hence the hazy appearance in this shot.)

Before final buffing, Steve carefully threads all the electronics back into place. On a hollow body guitar like this there is no easily accessed control cavity (like the back of  a Les Paul) or pick guard (like a Stratocaster) on which to mount the pots and jack. They have to be pulled through the pickup hole using fingers, dental floss, surgical tubing, or all of the above. It’s kind of like building a ship in a bottle.

Then, once the pieces are back in place, Dan buffs out the entire guitar.

Finally, we install  the hardware and a new pick guard to replace the crumbling and decaying original one you saw in the first picture. A fresh set of strings and this red rocket is ready to roar.

Oh, yea, and Dan refretted this guitar too. He worked so fast I couldn’t get pictures of him working! We’ll cover that subject in a future Workbench post.

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.

Most of the time, when changing even a single solder point on a hollow body guitar, we need to extract the entire wiring scheme through the bridge pickup hole. This takes time and patience, but does allow us to get a good look at components that probably haven’t been handled since the guitar was assembled in the mid ’60s. You can see the protective cans that encase the control pots and how the pots themselves are preserved – looking like brand new ones.

The pickups checked out and worked perfectly. What didn’t age so well, however was the wiring itself. Gibson has always used a single insuated conductor wire with a metal braid as a shield. Over the past 40-some years, the inner wire’s insulation has dried and crumbled. This allows the inner hot wire to rub against the grounded braid, shorting the signal completely in some cases.

There were so many areas where this happened that we had to bite the bullet and replace all of the connecting wires in this guitar. We used modern wire that looks the same as the old stuff. Of course this means one less original element to this guitar, diminishing it’s value a bit, but this guitar was purchased to be played and the crumbling old wire had to go. Then it all goes back through the pickup cavity and into place. Sort of like building a ship in a bottle.

With a new bar for the Vibrola tailpiece, and the guitar polished & set up, it looks and sounds great. There’s just something about those early Gibson humbuckers… Very nice.

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…

The owner of this old Harmony thought about it carefully and weighed the upside of keeping it original vs. turning it into a guitar he’d really like to play. Since its value will likely never be through the roof, he decided he’d rather hold onto it and convert it into a hollow body electric.  He wisely chose Chicago Fret Works and a Lollar Imperial pickup for the job.

We created a custom routing template and carefully cut a hole to fit the new pickup.  We also added a volume and tone control as well as a jack below the treble side F hole.

So did the owner of this guitar make a good decision? We think he did. He took a cool but not great old guitar that didn’t have a great deal of value and converted it into a unique custom guitar that he loves to play. If it was a 1940’s Gibson L-47 we would have argued against this work. But for this one, why not. And it sounds terrific.

We are proud to be the only authorized Chicago dealer of Lollar pickups. We feel they are among the best replacement pickups being made today. Who agrees and plays with them? Jeff Tweedy, Keith Richards, John Fogerty, Elliot Easton, Joe Perry, Johnny Marr and many, many more.

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!

First, a little background on what makes the Gibson Blueshawk so unique. The original design calls for a pair of P-90 pickups with a three position pickup selector. Simple enough, but here’s where it gets interesting. Anyone who has played P-90 pickups knows what Strat and Tele players know – single coil pickups hum. But when combined with another pickup that is wound in reverse with opposite polarity of their magnets, they cancel that hum. Hence the quiet 2 and 4 positions on a Strat switch. The Blueshawk design uses a third pickup that is reverse-wound, demagnatized, and mounted in the back of the instrument (pictured above with a piece of tape that reads ‘demagged’.) In combination with either of the top pickups, this third “dummy” coil cancels the hum in the same way the second coil of a humbucking pickup does but has no effect on the original tone of the pickups.

So your three hum-cancelling pickup positions are: 1. Neck pickup with dummy coil 2. Neck pickup and Bridge pickup 3. Bridge pickup with dummy coil. Throw in a 5 position variatone switch with a push/pull bypass option, and you’ve got a system that is complicated in design, but simple and smart in it’s operation.

“But Gibson never made a Blueshawk bass!”

That’s true, but our customer John did. He loved the idea of a bass that utilized this unique electronics scheme and liked the look of the Blueshawk. So he built himself this body and joined it to an old Gibson Ripper bass neck. That sounds easier than it really is. Good work John. We loved how he made the interesting choice of adding a Kahler vibrato bridge to this bass. What he wanted from us was to get the electronics working the way they should.

But the switch John bought online didn’t match the one in the schematics he found. So essentially, we had to create our own wiring to match the many functions he wanted on an oversized switch that wasn’t made for this job. Jim Respass who designs Stress FX effects pedals we carry here scrubbed in and helped interpret the schematic. After a lot of head scratching, soldering, desoldering, and soldering again, together we got it working. We made one modification to the original design by removing a treble bleed function where some of the treble tones of the bridge pickup are removed in the middle switch position. It just sounded dull. So we took that function out, refretted the 30 year old Ripper neck, and now John’s got himself a one-of-a-kind bass that plays, sounds, and looks terrific.

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;

it’s an unfinished cigar style box with a K&K Big Shot pickup mounted inside. We wired it to an output jack and “Voila!” a true electric stomping box. Now he’ll be able to play with different EQ settings, maybe stuff the inside with a sock to try deadening the sound… the possibilities are, if not endless, certainly intriguing.

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. He dropped us a line and sent some pictures. Way to go Wes!

Hey Steve,

Just wanted to let you know that the new guitar is awesome! Here are some pics of it at work at Blues Fest.

Thanks,
Wes