The Incredible Restoration of my 1958 Gibson Les Paul

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome back and thank you so much for being here today we are finally going to take a look at all of the repairs done to my 1958 gibson les paul special and honestly some of the work is so good that most people would probably not be able to tell anything was done so i think you guys are going to enjoy it hopefully if nothing else even if you're not into you know guitar or vintage guitars you know you can appreciate the level of craftsmanship and attention to detail that that went into repairing and restoring this this guitar while still trying to maintain the originality and the patina of this thing because it's just absolutely insane today we're gonna go into uh detail on how the electronics were fixed when i bought the guitar they were barely hanging on and if you haven't seen the other videos in the series i'll link those down below you can go listen to me play the guitar for the first time straight from goodwill but the pickups had to be completely rebuilt using the original components which is which is really cool and then there was also some really extensive woodwork and paint work that was done around the the switch area here and of course on the headstock as well but this headstock was broken and there was also a screw in the headstock that was hidden and somehow he was able to repair this thing and make it look as if it never was broken so we're going to get into all of those details today so if you want to follow joel and all of his repair work i will link his instagram down below he's always working on really cool vintage guitars starting out the pickups were cracked the bobbins were cracked and they were functioning but they were really microphonic this is just something that happens to old pickups after 60 years the plastics were kind of new technology then i decided to not really get into it any further and i shipped the guitar across the country to pennsylvania from oklahoma and joel began his work so you can see him removing the knobs which he's got this cool little tool i need to get one of these i think you can maybe get them from from stumac because these knobs are pretty fragile and you don't want to break a set of 50s les paul knobs they would be pretty expensive uh then you'll see the output jack down here this is supposed to be a piece of plastic from the factory but there were a number of different jacks on this guitar a bunch of extra holes and you can see here that joel is going ahead and removing this homemade jack that or jack plate rather that that someone put on here and it's not in the video but he went ahead and filled all of those holes we didn't do any touch-up work or anything down there now you can see the the original pots and capacitors it's interesting i got a lot of comments on the disassembly video where people were saying the these capacitors are actually resistors because of the painted bands on them i do believe they're capacitors that's what you use inside of a guitar like this and i believe they're known as the bumblebee capacitors and they're desirable for reasons basically that they were on late 50s les pauls but i'm not sure why there are painted bands on these like a resistor would have if someone knows the answer to that that would be interesting next you'll see here the the pickups coming out and this was a very delicate process obviously because one wrong mistake and you know you could damage the windings and then the pickups would be destroyed and there's there's no hope of restoring using the the original wiring so the the plan that we went with was to try to unwind the pickups and replace the cracked bobbins as you can see here and then rewind them using the original wire which is a very delicate process not many people can do this it's it's usually not worth the the time and the cost to do it but on this guitar it was certainly worth it and joel helped me out here here's the original three-way switch that came out with the braided wire now here's a close-up look at the pickup once it's been removed and you can see how the the bobbins are are broke cracked through the center and chunks of parts are missing so here's an interesting detail with the three-way switch as you can see inside there was actually cardboard a piece of cardboard made to repair the inside of the switch cavity because at some point it had totally been pushed through the thin piece of mahogany that held it in place and this is a common issue with gibson guitars you'll see a lot of 50s les pauls the the switch is broken in and so it was repaired with cardboard and some kind of epoxy and that's really not a long-term fix so we decided to go in and repair everything and it's it's very interesting to see how he was able to fix that area and and nearly make it invisible i think you guys are really gonna dig that now we're looking at joel going in and disassembling the pickups so uh you'll see that there's a piece of black tape wrapped around the the coil on these old p90s and he is very carefully removing these pieces of tape again one wrong move and you could damage the uh the wire and once once that's happened i mean there's there's just no going back [Music] and here you can see him unwinding the wire a little bit and just kind of getting it started and then wrapping it around a spool which i assume yeah we're gonna set it up on this machine here this is how you know they would wind pickups back in the day this is how a lot of people still do it once the pickup starts going you know you can see the wire coming out and seems he's just getting it going a little bit make sure it's moving freely and not hung up anywhere and then we're gonna see this thing get going [Music] as far as i know this would be really similar to the machines used back in the day by fender and gibson and when people talk about they were scatter wound by hand this is this is what they're talking about so i mean that thing is just flying and joel's just threading the needle there so moving on here he's got the pickups rewired using the original wire and we went and picked up a set of new replica bobbins i can't remember who made them if you're interested in that you're needing some bobbins for whatever reason drop a comment we'll we'll get back to you but again this is just the level of detail that he went into um just making the bobbins look look there looked like their original adding some some dirt and this is cool so he he saved the original tape again you know just a little detail that maybe some people wouldn't get but the tape goes around the outside of the the wire of the coil to i don't know add a level of protection i don't think it really has any other function other than that but using the original tape you know just one more component to making these look totally identical and now we've got the remaining components to the p90s which is the base plate and that looks like some kind of bar magnet of some type i'm not an expert on how p90s are manufactured so some of you will know better than i but all these original components put back into place these pickups are literally identical um to how they were originally except for the piece of plastic bobbin that broke you know sonically i can't i can't tell any difference to how they sounded before they sound better than they did before honestly because before they were pretty much unusable they were microphonic and also the bridge to the neck pickup they were not balanced so the neck pickup was much louder than the bridge just more assembly on the p90 getting the base plate secured there to the bobbin then you have the the two leads there that will be wired in place using the original lead and he's gonna attach this ground and there's the original braided lead wire to the pickup being attached to the base plate and then soldered in place there as well and then there's some heat shrink tubing over the exposed wire because you don't want that to contact anything obviously [Music] then the original pickups had a little piece of masking tape on the outside of that and what i found kind of interesting is that joel has a little test bed going here of different stains to match the original piece of masking tape as you can see there and uh he finally gets the right color and then uh matches the the tape so i mean it's just like a little detail that most people probably wouldn't go to that level and no one's ever gonna see this again so i don't know i just found that interesting that joel went to that extreme with it and then here is the final product from the outside but as you can see it looks totally factory nobody could tell the difference [Music] uh [Music] so here's a look at the three-way switch cavity that that was broken in and he's taking a little blade here and getting rid of uh some of the filler or epoxy or whatever was used uh it was it was definitely nasty stuff and he's just continuing to use a few different tools to remove that material then we're back with some masking tape on the front side side note you can see under the pickguard which people were oddly upset that i didn't remove the pickguard of this guitar to see what was underneath but as you can see there's nothing there but just you know 60 years of dirt and here joel is mixing up a filler to use to repair the underside of the three-way switch cavity and this is a simple but stable solution to repair this area and certainly will be better than the cardboard that was used previously [Music] here he's using a scraper to take off the top layer of the epoxy that was used to repair this area [Music] this is just getting the the repair ready for paint now this is what looks like a a sealer possibly that he's going to brush in over the repaired areas and this is the first of a few layers that you're going to see applied here before the final top coat [Music] now this is a solid color of paint possibly that is being brushed in specifically over the repaired areas and i think ultimately this is just being used to hide everything because the original color of tv yellow is actually translucent but you obviously don't want this repair coming through the finish so i think this is going to hide everything pretty well [Music] unfortunately we don't have footage of joel in the booth spraying this area or airbrushing it but it looks like he matched the nitrocellulose lacquer very closely which was probably hard to do because it's no longer tv yellow it's really a bronze brown color it almost looks like an aged gold top in some ways but what's so cool is you can see him brushing in and painting in the mahogany grain lines over top and this is what's gonna blend in the repair and make it nearly invisible i will say you can kind of still see that there is maybe a painted area here but once he's aged this a little bit added some checking and maybe a little bit of dirt to match the rest of the guitar you really can't tell that this was ever done it's pretty incredible [Music] so here is the before and you can see that that huge repaired area [Music] and now the final product you can see somehow he was able to replicate the checking there [Music] and this is a better shot of how the color matches most people would not be able to tell that that was ever a repair there maybe if you put this thing under a blacklight you could see something going on but apparently according to him he has ways to get around that as well so an unbelievable repair to the switch that i didn't i didn't really even expect myself you're probably wondering what is this rubber you know ring that's going around the switch this is a les paul this should have a poker chip here right in the few month window in 1958 for some reason gibson may have ran out of those poker chips or something i don't know but they use this rubber spacer or grommet whatever it might be on a number of 58 les paul guitars and so i was doing some research on this specific serial number and trying to look at guitars in that range and they all had this this rubber ring so he was able to locate something that was very similar and it looks exactly like the ones i've i've seen in photos online moving on to the headstock which i think is one of the most amazing repairs i've ever seen hopefully you guys are still watching and and uh enjoying this with me i'd love to hear from you guys uh what you thought about all these repairs if you think we did the right thing or maybe not i don't know whatever your opinion is that's all cool man but you can see the headstock originally had a very nice crack going going through it typical gibson guitar with the broken headstock and that's what makes it authentic and then joel started digging into it as you can see here to find that it was hiding a a flathead screw in the headstock yeah that's pretty pretty unbelievable so from here basically he removed the screw and uh he's getting this this area ready to to be dowelled i suppose there's a dowel or a plug whichever one it is but it looks to me like he filled this area with glue and then he used a maple dowel which any wood could be used here probably you want to use something stronger than mahogany which i would assume is is maple possibly that's what it looks like to me but i don't know for for a fact and that's glued in place hammered in place and once this is all said and done this is actually going to be probably more secure than it would be otherwise because it's it's been doweled and the the crack was secured as well and you can see in the video that the the crack had never been glued together it was still open essentially and you can see it flexing in the video so he was able to inject some glue into the the headstock and i mean this this is exactly the kind of fix that you want [Music] so here he's just taking off the top of this uh maple dowel and getting the area ready for the next part which is going to be a piece of mahogany that's specially cut to go with the grain and be blended in with everything else and there's using a drill bit to just kind of gauge how far he needs to open this thing up and then we have a mahogany block here that he's cutting at a certain angle he's going to create the the plug that goes on top here this is a some kind of paste filler that's colored and you'll see this is gonna go right on top there and the filler is just going to fill in all those gaps [Music] definitely some squeeze out there which is what you want and then clamped in place and left to dry for a while [Music] following up here this is what it looks like after all that definitely is not looking good i would say i mean you definitely are going to notice this repair so he's got his work cut out for him at this point but he's just shaving off the top got to get this area level so that he can refinish it using a file to take off the top of that piece of mahogany now once everything is level and ready for paint he's brushing on that same solid kind of paint to cover all the damage up and now that's about done there just doing the final detail work on that and here's the finished product again we don't have the video of him going in the spray booth with this thing and airbrushing it or however he he uh painted this lacquer on here but he's color matched it perfectly as far as i'm concerned which was probably a difficult job to do and now he's brushing in painting in the mahogany grain lines and that's what makes this disappear so after that obviously this is a old b-dip guitar so the paint has to match but there was also quite a few dense stings and scratches in this area to begin with so they were covered with with paint uh once he sprayed this area so that certainly wouldn't look right so he's going ahead and taking out all the paint from the existing dings and dents and scratches there was a pretty good one right there maybe that's where the guitar fell and broke the headstock actually so here's the before shot of the headstock break and the bit of epoxy there where the screw was hiding underneath you can see that really brown color at the headstock and here is the the final product if you can believe it i couldn't believe it when i got it back but that's hard to tell it really is a little closer from that same angle you can see the detail in the in the wood and the grain i mean it's it's gone [Music] a little different shot different lighting you can see the color and the blending into that back of the headstock where it was really dark brownish looking after all that's said and done this is this is what you get and you know this this repair job is is pretty much as good as it gets all things considered the crack is is gone and the extra piece of mahogany that was put in place because of the the screw that was in there i mean you can't see anything you can't feel anything it it almost looks factory i mean you can maybe see a little bit of the angle of the headstock there going into the neck uh is is slightly tapered a bit more but it's it's pretty close to to being invisible most people would not be able to to see the difference so i think this really wasn't necessary to do but joel wanted to see how far he could take it and i think he did an incredible job and and the most important part is the headstock is totally solid now and probably stronger than it was before so that's that's what matters but pretty pretty incredible work and i guess you know that carries on the story of this guitar from somehow being donated to a goodwill facility in in virginia to to me purchasing it and then all of the work that that had to be done to to get it where it is today so yeah i hope you guys enjoyed this video and as i said if you haven't seen the previous episodes i'll link those down below if you want to follow joel and uh and see the guitars he's currently working on check out his instagram you can also follow me there on instagram as well but i i've been spending a lot of time with the guitar over the past couple weeks here and uh really getting a good idea of how i like it to be set up and and what kind of sounds i i like to get out of it and what amp it sounds great through so i'm gonna spend a little bit more time with it and then i'm gonna do a you know a final video uh a full review and demo of the guitar and try to tell the whole story in a in a much better video and you guys can can listen to it in detail so i think that'll be really fun when the time comes but uh just want to do it right so thank you guys for watching today if you want to help support uh then you can just like this video comment on this video subscribe and and share it wherever you can that's really the best thing you can do and thank you guys so much for being here and i'll see you in the next episode peace

Channel: Matthew Scott

Views: 424,836

Rating: 4.9099541 out of 5

Keywords: norman's rare guitars, fender stratocaster, stevie ray Vaughan, joe bonamassa, john mayer, philip sayce, music is win, paul Davids, jared Nichols, robert baker, Jimi hendrix, Chris stapleton, Darrell braum, Rhett schull, Rick beato, mateus asato, Marty music, texas blues alley, Kenny wayne shepherd, Cobain, John frusciante, David Gilmore, Eric Clapton, eric Johnson, rich robinson, trogly, tom bukovac, jimmy page, Led Zeppelin, 1958 Gibson Les Paul Goodwill

Id: GTRbdwrsP6E

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021