1954 Gibson's Dirty Little Trick

[Music] well hey there gang let's go back yet again to the 1950s with this this is the very first cutaway Flatt Top Model ever commercially produced that's right this is the Gibson CF 100 it was in their lineup between 1950 and 1959 and they're a little on the rare side this one was built in 1954 what it is basically is an LG2 model fairly small flat top with a great big scoop removed from the treble side upper about there and for a first attempt boy they really went for it didn't they that's extremely pointy uh this is the Florentine style cutaway as opposed to The Venetian one the Venetian is the side is bent around the curve in a continuous piece the Florentine has the pointy thing as almost always there's a repair story this was converted at some point to an electric now Gibson itself produced the CF 100e starting in 1951 the next year uh they put a pickup at the end of the neck basically the guts of a P90 just like they did later with the j160 the dreadnots size flat top that Beatles used in the early days you can tell that this is not an original c100e because there's a lot more space between the end of the fingerboard and the um front of the um sound hole and there would be a line of little holes for the pole pieces of the pickup but like I say this has been unconverted the holes where the volume and tone controls were have been been plugged and the soundboard has been refinished I believe the entire guitar has uh at least got over spray on the back and sides there's also some side cracks which have been um refinished over and um the finishing job is nice I think they added a little hint of cherry red into the burst here um so it might be a little bit more red than original examples but I think it's really pretty nonetheless it's good looking guitar players of note well the only one that really Springs to my mind immediately would be Leon Redbone we lost Leon a few years ago he played oldtime Rag and Tin Pan Alley stuff things from the Great American song book um if you don't know him you should check him out cuz he was kind of like a living character study uh a theatrical construct like he was a very mysterious strange kind of guy who sang songs out of the teens and 20s and um very distinctive great player anyway there is no saddle left on this guitar it is all gone they squeezed every last drop of life out of it believe me and it's time for the neck reset um the nice thing is nobody decided to shave height off the top of the bridge these are already fairly low bridges this seems to be original height they did however cut extremely deep string ramps to get some downward pressure but even then it's kind of plinky sounds a little like I don't know like it's made of aluminum or something the action of course is perfect it's better than it came from the factory it's 564 on the Bas side 4 and 1 half on the treble ideal really um and the relief is good too there's only 8,000 of relief in the neck so this is wholly about the kind of auditory response and not about playability issues cuz it plays just fine so this is a neck res set that's devoted to you know trying to make it sound its best of course there is the possibility of some complications especially in a guitar that has been refinished or oversprayed like there is you know a lot of lacquer on these things to begin with in the area between the heel and the sides so we'll have to cut through that because there's been a bunch more added and this area here um the lacquer actually the brown comes up onto the side of the binding and that is kind of a a nasty sort of trick to pull on us because we have to cut through it and hope that it doesn't uh crack away the other thing is these guitars of course have a very flush heel along the side of the uh cutaway here it's you know perfect in this instance there's not even a crack in the lacquer of course this whole area has been resprayed and there is one long sort of goobery thing there as I've mentioned in recent videos anytime we've got this curved profile to the heel and we have to remove a bunch of material from the end uh this flush fit tends to go away because we start to reduce this both in width as well as length so there tends to end up being a lip there which is just something we'll have to live with the back is in excellent shape really nice there are a couple of cracks I think they might be cold checks in the lacquer but we'll also have to inspect that really closely to make sure that they're not open the period appropriate double line Clon Deluxe tuners double line because we've got two lines of text on them one says Clon the other says Deluxe later on it would just be Clon Deluxe in a single line and then there are no lines which actually do have a line but it's not got any text in it the neck is in excellent condition too one little sort of delamination spot there behind the second or third fret couple little dings and the places where these things usually end up after they get rested against something sharp with a straight edge projecting the top of the Frets to the front of the bridge it meets about halfway down there's about 530 seconds worth of space between the underside of the straight edge in the top in that area with the string tension on with no string tension there's very little difference almost none which would suggest that we've got a good stiff top on this guitar it doesn't move very much it doesn't pull up or get pushed around too much by the string tension which can be a good thing or a bad thing um some slight deforming of the soundboard under tension is kind of normal and if you have absolutely none sometimes that means it's overbuilt just looking through the sound hole I see there there are a couple of side cracks which have been cleated and there's a bunch of what looks like white sawdust up around the center strip there where it meets the third back brace like it was never vacu Ved out after someone did some kind of sanding in there so better look inside things seem kind of typical it looks as though the bridge has been reglued at some point as there's some seepage through the pin holes and it also seems when that was done the two retaining machine screws usually on either side were not included which is a choice interesting the glue squeeze out seems to vary from place to place like on the finger BRAC is there it looks almost like white aliphatic glue rather than hide glue which is perplexing looking down towards the end of the body what's this little thing here why it's an errant cleat earmarked no doubt for some other location in the guitar which got out of control and fell into the murky depths and the repair person thought it would be shielded from the eyes of the world his secret safe but like the antagonist in a play by uid all has come to light we know your secret shame sir someone has swapped out the original plastic Bridge pins for Ebony ones um with no slot these are non-slotted which kind of makes sense given How Deeply cut the uh string ramps are the Locker on the sides of the heel has to be sliced through cuz it's so thick um some heat will be helpful I'm using a candle here vanilla scented because I'm fancy it's not the best thing to be honest an alcohol lamp might be cleaner and in part less soot on the blade but it works can only do about 3 cm at a time it's really thick lacquer cuz there's the original stuff on there and then whatever was put on in the respray uh heat and free up the fingerboard extension then score along and remove the 15th fret for access drill some holes for my heat probes I hit the pocket right on in go the electrodes say it with me again folks these are from hot wire Foam Factory we'll turn them on and uh let them go for about 10 minutes because this is a hide glue joint and because this is a Gibson guitar with a lot of area to the front of the heel which sometimes gets glue I'll occasionally uh put a droplet of water in there halfway along to get a little steam into the process as well just a little bit just a little squirt now this is something new seems like the wood has swollen really tightly around the shafts here I've used these things on 20 guitars now it's the first time this has ever happened but I can't easily pull this out now this this one is stuck too it must be full of glue or something after three rounds of heat it really hadn't budged at all and I decided to resort to steam about one in 20 Gibsons seem to need it they won't do it any other way it took a lot of steam before a wiggle appeared and even then it just did not want to come free so I wiggled and wiggled and at which point I realized Yep this is one of those fabled guitars assembled with the soundboard over top of the dovetail pocket the board was bulging but there's no way the neck will come out without massive damage unless I can cut through the spruce that's in the way I use a portion of a thin bladed Japanese saw to slice through the center of the 15th fret in between my steam holes there down through the fingerboard and into the pocket I need to finesse it with some jabby cut with a long knife as well and finally even then it still took some doing it came free and there you can see the soundboard on top of the dovetail okay time to unclench and regroup I had to go back and watch some of the video because I know I missed some of it my battery went in the middle of everything the bizarre thing is I mentioned this as a remote possibility to the owner when he dropped the guitar off not sure why uh I've encountered two neck over dovetails in 13 years how did I have this premonition I don't know I'd never heard about this being an issue with this particular model and I don't even know that it is I heard Mark stutman described recently the number of factory rops that Gibson was doing back in the 1930s and just how common it was a lot of those L's and smaller guitars Etc had tops although they were made of you know Adera Spruce they caved right in seemingly almost immediately um someone gets their guitar puts 13s on it and then Tunes it up to open E that exceptionally lightly built L has suddenly 180 lbs of string tension on it and they just go Crunch and I think Mark said something like 10% or even more were coming back for warranty repair a huge number that had to get fixed and it seemed like top over was one way of doing that the last time I encountered this was a 1936 or 37 Gibson catalog guitar uh basically a Gibson with a different label on it um like a kalamazo it was a Carson J Robeson some montgom reward catalog guitar basically an L with a different label people ask why a company like Gibson would build like this and I can't answer that because I'm not even sure this was ever really Doctrine this probably wasn't the standard procedure ever but the repair department sees catastrophic soundboard damage and they just like route off the old top with the neck in place saw or chisel the remaining Spruce off from under it the fingerboard extension then they can slip a new top in there perhaps even thin down a bit at the upper end which is something John Graven once observed um I'm not sure if he ever attributed to repair technique or if he thought it was like standard procedure but they do seem to get thinner up here sometimes um then they could add a wedge of spruce to take up that little bit of space send it back to the finishing Department it was quicker than trying to repair a broken top you know you can take a fully assembled top off the line and put it right in there but it also seems like they may have done batches of guitars this way in initial assembly maybe I'm not sure what it would do to the speed of production because remember these guitars were all finished after the neck was attached so it probably didn't make much of a difference to things uh but setting the neck angle might have required some care I don't know maybe it was an experiment tried several times over 20 years with small batches of various models just never caught on I'm not sure there's anyone living who could really tell you why as a repair person you can imagine how frustrating it is cuz there's no real way to know what's going to happen until you're in there and when you see that soundboard lifting it's almost too late because you're on the edge of breaking something the thing is if you're resetting Gibsons often you know how variable the dovetail fitting can be and even the standard neck there can be real problems pulling them out cuz they'll fight you all the way due to lots of different size shims or just general weirdness and it's going to take a while for you to figure out what's going on in this case with the steam I've got a little bit of blushing in several areas and you know all the lacquer on the base of the heel in this case just slid right off so rather than a straightforward reset I'm now going to be doing careful and extensive finish work on this it's not a little touchup along the sides of the heel which is necessary usually this is now a multi-week job because there's a lot of lacquer a lot of thickness that has to cure and I have to wait to be honest for all of these parts to get good and dry before I can try and fit them together again they got to sit for several days so it's not going to be in this video obviously you'll see it eventually so let's see if we can work on some other finishing other things about this particular example there was a lot of glue on the front surface of the the side here and the heel which is really kind of a nightmare because it's so far away from the heat source and also sometimes the steam has a difficult time uh penetrating and I know I haven't said it very much lately but penetration is still very much Paramount um so it's sticky and so much so that there's a portion of the um the side here which is still adhered to the front of the heel um my heat probes are in right position I hit the pocket right on don't know why it was so difficult to pull them off and also more evidence that this may in fact be a ROP because this binding comes along and this section here appears to be different it seems to have been cut right along the edge of the heel so if a new top was put on they could bind up to the heel and not have to go past into the section that's under the the wood so that's some fairly good evidence I think that it might have been a factory ROP also on the heel itself you can see this remnant of soundboard uh there's a gap between it and the front face of the heel as well so there we go who knows when it was done I'm going to do a little finish work on the ES330 today I think this is part of the reason I should never put like a a multi-part video series out there where it's labeled part one part two part three because expectation is that I do one thing and then move on to the next but in reality it's always multiple jobs going on at the same [Music] time just the way it works folks so this is like part one and a half uh this plug is maybe 2 mm proud of the surface so I have to cut it back down again we're dealing with an arch top so this this is not flat uh I have to plain this and get it close and then sort of finesse it into a shape that's sort of like the surroundings why don't I take off all the electronics well I'm doing my best to not do that because that makes job very very expensive and it might not be necessary so I've got my trusty hand plane here block plane and um it's not pretty but the blade is sharp and you see that I'm actually planing across the grain which might be surprising to some people but in a case like this where I'm eventually going to end up with a curve if I go across I don't really have to worry about the grain Direction very much what I'm shooting for is kind of a lump with the very edges or the the perimeter flush with in this case the tape that'll give me a little bit of room to sand and blend and then I can work on the interior part um and really kind of fair the [Music] curve onto the cabinet scraper this is a piece of Steel which is kind of springy the edge is square in cross-section and it's been burnished into a little tiny hook which acts like kind of a miniature plane blade and um it removes shavings of material very controllable and with this I can sort of model the surface and end up with the curve that I'm looking for delicate work I'm going down to the level of the tape obviously that's on there to protect the Finish um I'm continually checking with my fingers it's easier to do with touch than sight and then eventually I'm playing through the tape and I can sort of get directly to the level of the lacquer around without digging into it which is kind of nice the cabinet scraper is flexible enough that I can bend it into a curve and that's how I achieve that without raking over the um previously finished surface now on to some 220 grit sandpaper on a cork-backed block very small block but uh this will sand the surface and it's actually providing sort of a key for the sealer coat to latch onto it's possible to sand things too smoothly if you're going to do a film finish you you don't really want to go higher than about 220 grit no I'm trying to show you the pigment stain on my finger I'm not giving the guitar the finger this is a very finely Blended powdered pigment which um is activated by lacquer or shellac or what have you and um it can be applied dry usually with a fingertip and blended into the surrounding color to be honest I wasn't happy with um the way this turned out it just it did not look good it was blotchy and uh I decided eventually to scrape this all clean and try a different approach I got out my airbrush and I'm using a lacquer which has been lightly tinted with a yellow tone trying to get very close to the center of the Sunburst in terms of density um give myself a base upon which I can add the other colors in the Sunburst and this is uh it's multiple coats the airbrush is nice and that the um lacquer dries very fast and it's a very thin mix it's about 50% lacer 50 thinner so I'm going to build this up over time now I've added a drop of am to the mix which will create this sort of midtone it's kind of a pumpkiny sort of color and I'll go back and give that several coats and now finally the cherry red in which I'll kind of mimic the burst some of this color will eventually be sanded off um back to the clear lacquer below to kind of blend things even more so I'm going a bit generous I want to make sure that it goes right through the uh the plug there and that's where we're going to leave it this week going to shoot several more coats of clear Locker on top of this and we'll be ready to buff up and get this thing back in order see you soon

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Id: zCRTYNF5Zgo

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024