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 »

Not your average 1970’s acoustic, this Mossman South Wind is a great example of one of the better small manufacturers of that era. We reset the neck angle and refretted it for more comfortable action and sound.

Mossman Guitars is a smaller American guitar company with an interesting history dating back to the mid 1960’s. They have always sought to focus on high quality construction and materials

The owner of this South Wind model suffers from arthritis in his hands and needs his guitars to be set up with low action. But this particular guitar, like most acoustics over 20 years old, had gradually developed an under-set neck that is evidenced by high action and a low bridge saddle. A simple set-up just wasn’t going to give us the results he needed so we opted to reset the neck angle. Continue »

A true pre-war Martin rides again with a neck reset, crack repair, and bridge reglue!

The owner of this 1930 Martin 518 saw work we performed on another Martin and entrusted us to repair a lengthy side crack, separated bridge, and to reset the neck angle. This is work we frequently perform on older Martins, but we thought you might like to see it done on a real pre-war model.

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Can’t afford a real 1952 Telecaster? We made this new guitar feel like it was 55 years old. De Leon’s nightmare.

For a variety of reasons, some folks just prefer old guitars. Maybe it’s the neck, worn smooth by years of handling. Maybe it’s the checked and cracked finish that looks like granddad’s old tube radio. Maybe it’s just the charm of something that’s played some music in its time. Or maybe it’s the fact that vintage guitars’ values are reliably and steadily rising – making them a good investment. But some of us can’t find or afford our real dream guitar. So at Chicago Fret Works, we’ve developed a relic process that will simulate aging in a guitar, giving it the look and feel but not the pricetag of a genuine vintage piece.

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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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*Beware: another one of those ‘I found this vintage Les Paul in my dad’s closet’ stories follows. I like to think that if my dad had one of these in his closet I’d have found it by now.

This 1956 Les Paul Junior belongs to a friend who, yes, found this guitar in her dad’s closet. But she couldn’t play it because there’s a pretty obvious piece missing: the entire headstock! This isn’t your average reglue job. This will require building a new headstock, replacing the truss rod, and making it look as if nothing ever happened. Read on to see how. Continue »

Watch how we restore a vintage guitar that was quite literally “trashed.”

If your 1963 Polaris White Gibson SG Junior had a broken headstock, you wouldn’t throw it in the garbage would you?  Well the lucky new owner of this guitar found it sticking out of a Chicago trash can with all of its original parts! He brought it to us to repair, still amazed by his fortune.

After the head shaking and jaw dropping was finished, we got down to making this gorgeous vintage piece look and sound like nothing happened. Continue »

If you really think about it, a steel string acoustic guitar is trying to break itself from the first time you string it up.  It’s two pieces of wood (a body and a neck) that are glued together with metal strings tied to the opposite ends of both pieces. When you tighten those strings up to pitch, they put over 150 lbs of pressure on that glue joint; extrapolate that over 20 or 30 years and it makes sense that the wood gets compressed and shifts position a little. The result is that the neck angle changes and string action slowly gets higher and higher. So as techs, we chase that changing angle by lowering the saddle a bit every time we set it up. Eventually we run out of saddle material and need to reset the neck angle.

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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 »