I Bought a "Chibson" but Got a REAL Gibson!

welcome back troglodytes to your daily dose of guitar information the trogly's guitar show today we have a mystery to solve this guitar had somebody commission a private help session and they asked me is this real because the price seems too darn good to be true so it's for sale at a legitimate music shop it was advertised as an sg custom and there's only like 1700 bucks so he was asking me is this thing real and is it worth what they're wanting so i took a look at the photos i was like i swear i've seen that guitar on reverb before sold as a modified sg standard and he gotten some additional photos from the place that had like the serial number and things like that so it kind of made sense to me that it was just a made over real gibson sg and even though the listing of dirty sold he was just kind of curious he wanted to know what my take was on it anyways so fast forward a couple of weeks later he messages me again and goes oh no it must have been a fake it's here again listed as a copy a replica and at that point i just figured you know he wasn't interested anymore so at that point the listing had been taken down again i was like whoever got that just got a steal of a deal but since it just said listing ended i messaged the seller to see is this thing still available and lo and behold reverb just took it down because they don't let you sell replicas there so i bought it thinking that guy was already done he thought it was fake even though i told him no it's probably not a fake but he got that message at like the same time as is i guess they messaged him too that it was available on their website he was so excited for it but then i was like oh man we're in an awkward situation now i bought it because i thought you were done with it so even though i'm pretty darn confident this is actually a legitimate gibson sg that's just been reworked i'm gonna sell to him for the 400 because i didn't mean to step in on this that's not what my private help sessions are for i'll let you know if i'm interested if you're not in it and then then i might buy it but it's always about the help person for me and all man he's getting a killer deal for this so here's what i think before really even looking at this somebody bought this was like very confused on how this could look the way it is and they bullied the shop into thinking it was a fake and so they returned it however just feeling this i know it's a real gibson and the fact the shop sold it for 400 bucks is mind-boggling so let's go ahead and review the facts as far as what i know here so to pick up sg it looks like we have a nashville style bridge we now have an ebony fretboard on this no fret nib so that probably scared somebody but that's definitely just evidence of a refret job it appears somebody's replaced the nut on this so that probably scared them and then what's going on with this so this is a norlin era headstock veneer it's got the early 70s style gibson logo so i'm sure that really scared somebody when they flipped it over back here and it says made in usa 2011 has a legitimate 2011 serial number on it i'm surprised the shop let themselves get bullied out of this thing for 400 bucks yeah this is easily easily worth at least like 15 to 18 and that's why i told him the first time this is a beautiful piece now of course we still need to tear it apart because it could just be like a gibson neck that has been reworked and put on some like epiphone bodybutt now there's not much of a mystery just from looking and feeling this thing it's a legit gibson and the fact that we could get it for 400 bucks i mean we we were both thinking the exact same thing heck that is a real gibson usa case it's one of the good canadian made ones it's actually probably earlier than this guitar this is worth like 250 bucks on its own so even if it was a fake for 200 bucks you're fine let's see does this have case candy with it that'd be hilarious nope just looks like some extra strings shawler counterparts does this have showers yes it does so now the question persists what did the start life as it was probably just an sg standard from 2011. somebody replaced the fretboard maybe even did a full refinish or at least refinish on the neck i mean this feels really good and it's got the serial number and everything so yeah standard converted to custom two pickup custom specs very cool let's go ahead throw it on the workbench and take an individual look at its parts and specs inside our mystery sg it's not such a mystery i mean just looking in here you should be able to tell that's a real gibson those are the types of writings that you would find in the early 2010s era and even beyond so cw stands for classic white and we've got the long neck tendon in here as we should see no idea what that's trying to say but i'm sure that's a model identifier then our bridge pickup cavity yeah that's definitely what gibson's look like in this era they've got the fuzzies of the woods either due to dole router bit or just not very good quality woods or the fact that they just didn't clean it up before they finished it but this is what this would have looked like originally now probably would have had pickup covers and maybe even gold hardware i'm not sure but it would have had the rosewood fretboard with the acrylic trapezoids had the regular gibson head stock on it but you look right in here you see the same cw for classic white so no doubt in my mind this left the factory as an sg standard and got converted to custom specs but let's check out our pickups so are these actually like 57 classics or something that had their stickers worn off at first i was curious about that because it does look pretty close to that but when you really start looking at it you can tell there's some differences like how much solder is used to keep the cover on the colors by the legs that's on each of them likely to signify neck and bridge so that's a blue coloring and the hot one the red one for the bridge then you gotta look at the wire coming out of here now some gibsons they will have this generally they're a lighter gray color though but that just means you typically have four conductor wiring so the next thing i did was see if there were any coil splitting technologies on this unfortunately no there's not so it seems like the only thing not right on this guitar are the pickups so far but our bridge is reading 14.21 k ohms our neck position 10.5 yeah those definitely not gibson's in the middle somewhere around seven and a half ish okay so just looking in here that shop should have known this was a real gibson but i think what threw him off was seeing the tone pros on here so the guy probably looked at this and was like ah gibson's don't have this little nut locker thing right here some of them do some gibson guitars do ship stock with tome pros hardware but it's also a very common upgrade you know for fakes and other various guitars but for the guy that gets to own and play this thing that's a fantastic upgrade like used i think these are what worth 80 dollars a set so there you go just in your bridge and case not even the guitar yet he's already got well worth his money outside of that just regular two volumes two tones output jack on the front i mean everything's been converted to gold hardware but you can see the pickard does not exactly line up right here i mean just looking at this you can tell it's not a gibson product or it was reshaped to fit this guitar because there's some areas that are just kind of wonky looking mainly right there but when you flip over to the back it's just black so maybe somebody just made this themselves to fit the guitar had to modify an existing one but you will note that the finish is like slightly discolored where this is so that means this is kind of like discoloring the finish somehow that happens occasionally but now the tenon cover was a real shock so it looks like this when i got it right flipped it over it's a real les paul custom uh plate right there but it looks like all the other screw holes lined up perfectly except for that one so now moving on from the mahogany body this is where things get interesting the neck so it doesn't look like it's ever been taken out to me so that means somebody skillfully pried the fretboard off and put an ebony one on here and they did a fantastic job so that means this is likely the gibson original finish here too i was fully expecting the whole darn thing to have been refinished to hide some of the rework but it looks really good it doesn't even look like they had to refinish the neck it doesn't feel like they did i mean is that even a possibility that you could remove the fretboard so cleanly without having to redo the finish because then i started to think is this actually an ebony fretboard i mean the wood grain doesn't quite look like the ebony's that gibson typically uses but whenever somebody does like inlay conversions like say they just stained the rosewood fretboard which i definitely do not think is the case with this wood grain you always want to look at the 12th fret because if it started life as like a studio or something that has dots like a special you'll be able to see where they filled it in like check out the chet atkins prototype video you can see a filled in inlay on that one or on the other hand if it started as a standard like this one you would still see a little bit poking out from the trapezoid inlay the blocks would not completely cover that so sometimes what people do to get around that is they make the 12th fret inlay bigger to cover that all up however these are all the same size so they had to have replaced the fretboard and these are real pearl inlay fantastic job whoever did this i swear i've seen this guitar on reverb before advertised properly but i can't find that old listing i guess to be fair here in putting the new fretboard on there is some additional finished checking in this area that kind of goes crazy right here on the side of the neck and maybe there's actually a headstock repair hiding under here underneath the new finish there's no way to know but the next move they did they got one of them norlin era headstock veneers and you're probably asking yourself well how the heck did they do that these things are on ebay all the time you can pick them up for a hundred bucks it's like a thin sheet of wood essentially some of them are real wood some of them not they just slap it on the headstock that's what's got the binding and that's it's got the logo the fanciness mother of pearl and then you just shave the headstock to match now these 61 reissues generally have really pointy headstocks so it works really well for the norlin era style headstock veneer because you know they were kind of bigger headstocks at that time i still haven't blacklit this yet but it appears that once again they pulled off a nearly perfect job as far as maybe not even having to refinish the sides and the white of the neck and just have to like spray a clear coat over the top i mean looking at this that also should have told the shop now that that's a real gibson that's a real gibson but i'm guessing the shop did not have hardly any money in this because the box that they shipped it in said goodwill so maybe they picked it up at goodwill for like 100 bucks and if somebody told them it was a fake it's like uh-oh we're not losing our butts on this i even took one of the tuners off to see if you know maybe something had been messed with here but i mean that all looks okay to me this model originally came with clues and tuners we even get a sweet les paul custom truss rod cover obviously not stocked to this particular guitar switching over to the back things get even more fun now if i were a scammer the very first thing i would do is take out the electronics and put ones that say gibson in it so i suppose i can cut that shop some slack on that because you know it's gibson electronics but this appears to be the exact factory stock option that it left the factory with it's even got those same tiny little blue capacitors right there however you can definitely tell here the ends of the pickups there are actually only two conductors so those are definitely not gibson it wouldn't surprise me if it was something cheap like maybe those stumack pickups you know they sound good i think they call them new age or something like that they're decent but not expensive but the rest of the guitar here nice and clean i mean you've got some scratches and some finish checking up by the neck that we were talking about but looking around the finish here i mean it doesn't look like the neck has ever been off unless the entire thing was refinished but you've got your golden shawler strap locks everything's looking correct as far as specs go moving up the back side of the neck it's got a nice yellow hint to it but back here we do have some finished checking like i was talking about you do see that occasionally on gibson's and it's just caused by cold weather checking usually during shipment or when somebody's changing out a nut but there's also a couple of them stemming from these tuners here but that's serial number just because you see a gibson that has the maiden usa stamp and a serial number that looks like this doesn't mean it's real but this one you can tell it's real most of the knockoffs are like 2005 2006 serial numbers and i think that's what hurt that shop's listing is they didn't have a photo that showed this but the guy who had commissioned the private help session he got that photo from them and that's why it gave me confidence that it was real in the first place but you might ask yourself why would somebody go through all this time and trouble wouldn't have been cheaper just to buy a used custom shop or something my best guess is maybe this had some finished checking from the factory it got sold cheap and it got sold to a guy who knew how to do this and how to do it right so it wasn't necessarily i'm paying somebody 600 bucks to rip the fretboard off get a new fret job new fretboard new headstock veneer it was huh let's grab a couple of beers let's do this on a weekend type project that would be my best guess but this is phenomenal work whoever did it i mean if somebody came out with a story article that said gibson made new old stock looking 70s les paul customs in 2011. i believe this is factory i mean that's how good this was done sometimes refins and reworked guitars they don't feel right but this one it's nice it's so nice that's why i believe it's the factory original finish but i'm ready to be proof wrong here so top side of the guitar glows like so we've got a little bit of a finish abnormality right there maybe some sort of an overspray because that doesn't look like your normal like sweat absorption type stuff let's see what does that look like on the back nope okay so back here i suppose you could say that might be a strap reacting to the finish but i i don't think so that must have been touched up or something now going on to here we can see that the neck glows significantly different from the body so that explains a heck of a lot on this guitar so the neck had to have been refinished they had to have taken all that off put a new fretboard on new headstock veneer respray all this white and then do that okay that makes a lot more sense than somebody just perfectly ripping a fretboard off so the body likely still has the original finish but had to have some touch-ups because maybe it got damaged or something but the neck still doesn't look like it was ever removed to me so i i'd be willing to bet that it never was but that definitely makes a little bit more sense as far as the face of the headstock and the rest of it goes i thought that was sounding kind of weird to say but it was definitely played after the refund job it's got a small ding right there so yeah picked up a real sg standard converted to a custom for 400 bucks you can't make these kinds of stories up normally these videos go the other way i bought a new gibson it turned out to be a fake no this time it's i bought a fake gibson it turned out to be real man but anyways now that we're back in regular lighting situations you can kind of see what we were seeing under black light right here i just thought that was like some weird smudges but no something to do with the finish how's the back okay you can very clearly see that now that's definitely some sort of a white touch-up that's the power of black lights you can see different hues within the finish like that so yeah definitely had some sort of a damage so maybe this was out of shop it dropped it like broke some of the finish down here so somebody got it cheap and got to rework it i'm just not realizing i forgot to take neck dimensions but this is what it looks like at the first fret in the 12th fret typical sg neck definitely one of those wide thin style necks i'm pretty light at six pounds 12.7 ounces all right let's go ahead and plug this conversion job in and see how it sounds [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] do [Music] boom [Music] right i think it sounds pretty halfway decent go ahead and kick on some distortion so [Music] uh [Music] [Music] hey [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] now that we know all about this mysterious sg what are my final thoughts on this surprisingly actually a really nice guitar to play whenever something's been reworked it's not always a guarantee that it's going to be a nice playing guitar unless somebody competent was doing the work and i've got to say somebody competent was doing the work like the action looks like it's high but it's because you've got these giant railroad track frets on here now you could always file those down to whatever size you actually want it's better to have two bigger frets than not enough frets so that's already done but i could totally see why somebody would have saw this and like sent it back and said no no that's a fake oh man i just hate to be the guy who sent this back to that store and then see this video and go whoa what it was real yeah yeah it was real and it got sold for 400 bucks so one very lucky private help session guy this time he's getting a killer deal on this it is easily now that i've played it at least worth 1500 bucks maybe even a little bit more i'm sure somebody might actually pay a small premium for this since it looks like an actual custom now maybe 2 000. i'd probably be pushing it since we don't have actual gibson pickups in here but it looks pretty darn good oh and in case you've fallen in love with this guitar and you want a white sg custom with only two pickups check out an sg elite from the late 80s it's not quite the same you don't have the super fancy headstock veneer you do get the crown though but it has the ebony fretboard with the block inlays and it also has a coil split switch just like the original custom light series you can check out this review and demo right here if you want to learn more about that so troglodytes i hope you enjoyed this very strange tale of buying a fake gibson and actually getting a real one you probably won't see many more stories like that on the internet thank you for tuning in today i upload daily usually around 7 pm eastern standard time we'll catch you tomorrow on the next one take care [Music] do [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Trogly's Guitar Show

Views: 52,411

Keywords: the trogly's guitar show, trogly, trogley, gibson, gibson les paul, fender, fake gibson, fake sg, fake gibson sg, Chibson, Chibson Review, Trogly Chibson, Fake Guitar Trogly, Chibson SG, Chibson USA, FAke Gibson guitar, fake guitar, how to spot a fake gibson, les paul, fake chibson, fake gibson les paul, chibson guitar, fake gibson guitar, cheap guitars, chibson vs gibson, chibson les paul, chinese gibson, chinese guitar, gibson guitar, fake les paul

Id: JkTMGxbOLYM

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021