Gretsch mystery holes for location?

When refretting this 1967 Gretsch Firebird, I noticed two small holes in the 14th fret slot and another two in the 2nd fret slot.

I’ve never seen these before but imagine that they are for locating pins to ensure correct positioning of the fretboard when it’s being glued to the neck?

There is not much as satisfying as a nice shiny refret!

Gretsch Firebird Jet refret done

Stripping this Lemondrop is hard work

I stripped the top over a couple of weeks and probably spent about ten hours on the job altogether! My fingers lost their feeling from the vibration of the mouse sander.

Once I had the finish off, I sanded with the grain using 320 grit sandpaper to give a smooth surface.

Lemondrop stripped

Stripping the top required a lot of care as the flame maple veneer is quite thin and I didn’t want to damage it. I’m glad to say that I didn’t.

First coat of clear lacquer

I sprayed a few coats of cellulose sanding sealer, and sanded it back to give a smooth surface. You can see that some colour remains from the factory dye.

I then followed with Clear Amber and then used my Tinted Gloss to give a barely perceptible “unburst” edge.

Unburst

Once happy with the colour I sprayed plenty of Clear Gloss nitrocellulose lacquer to seal and then after a few days flatted back and buffed to a shine before reassembling.

Finished lemondrop refinish

Here’s a closeup.

Closeup

This time the fitter had cut the slot too far back, and had removed the rosewood behind the existing nut, rather than just 3/32″ in front of it. They had also managed to snap the two tiny screws off in the neck. I’d normally have to extract them, but as the new nut was going in the correct position, some 3/32″ close to the first fret, I could leave them where they were.

Shelf cleaned up

Above shows where I have tidied the missing wood, ready to accept a rosewood fillet.

Here is the fillet being test-fitted for height and length. I have tried to match the grain pattern as best as I can.

Test fit of rosewood fillet

Once I had glued the fillet in place and trimmed the edges, I cut the slot for the LSR roller nut using my Stewmac bridge slotting jig.

Cutting the slot for the LSR roller nut first pass

Cutting the slot for the LSR roller nut second pass

I first cut the slot 1/4″ wide to the correct depth before moving the jig slightly to cut to correct width with a second pass of the router.

Relacquering the end of the fretboard

I relacquered the end of the fretboard as it would have been originally.

Here is the nut in place. I think I did okay matching the grain.

New LSR roller nut in place

And finally, here is the guitar reassembled and restrung.

Restrung and set up

Bakelite Snakehead prototype pickguards

These pickguards are made from “Bakelite” sheet and lacquered in clear gloss nitrocellulose .

They’re made to fit replicas of Leo Fender’s 1949 “Snake head” prototype that he used to take around to clubs for artist to try. It is from this guitar that the Telecaster was developed.

Wal Pro II Bass

Wal Pro II Bass

The Wal Pro series of basses was introduced in the late 70s and this is an early version as shown by the 9-laminate headstock.

This came to me to fix a problem with the electrics, which are very unusual, having a large printed circuit under whole of the pickguard to which all the components are soldered.

I cleaned the series/parallel switches and replaced two potentiometers. The original pots had imperial sized shafts so the metric replacements had to be padded out with brass sleeves.

Kramer 450B aluminium necked bass

Kramer 450B Bass

This mid-seventies bass was converted to fretless but the job was untidy. The synthetic fretboard was badly chipped where the frets had been removed and the infill (which looked like glazers’ putty) was crumbling away.

I recut the fret slots and inserted slivers of white plastic to act as markers. I glued these using Cyberbond Power Drop black superglue which I also used to fill the chips in the board.

One piece of trivia is that this bass was used on the recording of ABC’s seminal album The Lexicon of Love!

Guild B-301 Fretless Bass

Guild B-301 Bass

This bass has been stripped and given a new pickguard at some time early in its life and had a nasty headstock break that had been repaired and re-broken.

I carefully cleaned the old glue from the break and re-set it. Unfortunately the repair will never be pretty but it ought to give years more service.

Gibson L9-S Ripper Bass

Gibson “The Ripper” Bass

These early Ripper basses have two humbucking pickups, designed by Bill Lawrence, and a four way pickup selector control giving series, parallel and out of phase combinations.

The bridge only setting and the two in-series settings were silent, which indicated that the bridge pickup was dead. These pickups are not easy to fix, as the insides are epoxied to the case, but using some ingenuity I was able to get the insides out and have the coils rewound.

I can’t stress enough the need for thorough preparation for a guitar finish to turn out well. Black lacquer is very reflective and shows every defect, so it is especially important here.

Sanding sealer

Sanding sealer soaks into end grain

The first step is to sand the body well with fine sandpaper to remove any fuzzy edges from the machining process, then to apply plenty of sanding sealer.

Alder is a very absorbent wood and you’ll see it soaking into the wood, especially on the end grain.

I sprayed several heavy-ish coats until the end grain remained wet-looking, indicating that the wood had stopped soaking up the sealer.

Once I thought that I had plenty of sealer on, I let it dry overnight before block sanding.

Sanding showed up a few low spots and defects in the wood which I needed to treat.

The worst of them were a small knot between the control holes which could be seen as the sanding dust collected in it

and a depression in the edge of the body which remained shiny and unsanded.

Depression in edge of body

I filled each of these with Ronseal 2-pack brown wood filler

Knot filled with 2-pack filler

Depression in edge of body filled

and sanded smooth.

Knot fill sanded smooth

Edge repair sanded smooth

Afterwards, the whole body was given another coat of sanding sealer and allowed to harden overnight.

Index coat

I wanted to be sure that I had sanded out and/or filled every imperfection, so decided to use a technique I learned from my car-spraying days called an index coat.

An index coat is a very fine mist coat of black (or another colour) lacquer which is typically sprayed over a primed surface.

Index coat sprayed

You can even use this on transparent finishes because you sand it off again.

The index coat highlights imperfections because as you block-sand your guitar body, it remains in any low areas such as the very slight depression around our knot

Index coat reveals unevenness

and a few tiny dings which would have gone unnoticed.

Index coat reveals small dings

I continued sanding until no black lacquer remained so I was sure that the faces of the guitar were perfectly flat and free of the tiniest of defects.

I sprayed another coat of sanding sealer and sanded to 320 grit, ready for the colour coat.

Gibson J-200 lacquer cracks

The top on this Gibson J-200 has bellied a bit, so much so that the lacquer on the top has started to crack.

Consequently, I had trouble getting a low action and thought the guitar might be suitable for the JLD Bridge system, which can correct bowed tops.

Installing the JLD system was straightforward enough. I removed the endpin jack to be able to align the bridge system inside the guitar, with the rod contacting just below the endpin jack.

You should be able to see the body of the Bridge System in the lower photo.

The JLD bridge system won’t fix all guitars but in this case, the installation was a success and not only was the string height reduced but the guitar sounds better with an improved, tighter bass. I’m hoping that as the top responds to the tension of the bridge system, the action will come down even more in the coming weeks.

J-200 with JLD Bridge System installed

Gibson J-50

This vintage Gibson J-50 played great but the lower frets were getting worn and needed attention. The original frets were wide and low, and if I dressed them, it would have resulted in very little height indeed.

I agreed with the guitar’s owner that a partial refret was the best option.

I replaced the first six frets with Stewart Macdonalds wide-low fretwire which was a great match for the original in height and width. Once installed, the new frets needed only a light dressing and good polish to match the old fret. As always, it’s hard to see the join!

Gibson J-50 partial refret

Lucille Varitone true bypass modification

The owner of this Gibson Lucille wanted to get a better sound from his guitar. Although position “1″ on the Gibson Varitone switch is supposed to be bypass, it does leave the choke in the circuit which loses volume and precious tone.

As the guitar’s owner didn’t find the stereo feature of the guitar useful, there was an opportunity to convert the guitar to mono, and use the now redundant other half of the Varitone switch to switch the choke in and out of the circuit.

I found a post on the Les Paul Forum where someone had done a similar job on his Gibson ES-345 and kindly provided a wiring diagram.

The modified guitar now has a lot more volume in the bypass position and suffers no loss of tone.

Fender LSR before

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, or so they say.

The owner of this guitar fitted a Fender LSR roller nut himself and I have to say showed some skill in cutting the wood away.

Unfortunately he misunderstood how the nut should be fitted and cut away far too much wood.

I tidied the bottom of the hole let in a piece of maple to fill it. I profiled the top of the fillet using a radiused sanding block before gluing then once the glue had dried, accurately cutting the slot for the LSR nut.

The repair was lacquered over using my Clear Satin nitrocellulose lacquer and flatted back smooth.

I did consider replacing the maple up to the first fret to hide the join, but the issue is only cosmetic, the join cannot be felt and to replace more wood than necessary would have increased both risk and cost.

The finished job looks like this. I have used no shims and the action at the first fret is spot on.

Fender LSR after surgery