Restoration - Hollow Ibanez 1972

[George]

A friend that doesnt really play guitar had this guitar gifted to him from his father 20 years ago.

Strong mojo alert - ( please keep mojo unbilievers away at all costs  )

The legend has it that his father was a gambler and he got the guitar as a payment instead of money after winning a bet (unfortunately not against devil). The guitar seems to have been played a lot as the inlays, the frets and the fretboard is preety worn out. The neck joint has some stability issues - bigsby is rusty - nut/intontation/action etch are not even there since you cant string the guitar at all (tuners are completely broken). So after an inner dispute with myself about my luthier skills i took the decision to restore it only to find out that the guitar was ... cursed to play and look bad in a good way.

This is my journey
With a hand full of frets


with work, sweat & blood


and my few trusty tools (and handmade fretpress )


and the vintage not potted michrophonic humbuckers that i replaced (and saved them for later wax potting and maybe use)


and toothpicks (lots and lots)


shimming and leveling the neck joint and a drawing of BMO for good luck and mathematical sound


the guitar started to regain some of its former glory


(i moved the volume for ease of use)


I could post everything i did and believe me it was a lot of work (nut,bridge,electrics, bigsby cleaning & bigsby refiting and repairing the screwholes etc.) but i dont want to make the thread bigger than it is already.

But i feel that something is missing and i cant quite catch it (maybe the sustain ? or maybe it is my years playing solid body guitars telling me that the guitar i hold is a different animal).

Now no frets are buzzing, intonation is just, even with 12s flats the action can get really low, nut is low as it should, it keeps the tune good and it feels really smooth. Overall i am happy with the result and the guitar is really playble (you can even shred with a radius that flat) So i hope you enjoy this journey as i did, restoring an instrument almost double my age.

[matmosphere]

Very nice, going to have to take a closer look later!

[Jebus]

What a beautiful guitar! Great job restoring it. I wouldn't have moved the volume pot, I really dig the original placement. But what ever works for the player is the best.

[galaxiex]

Very nice!

I restore... that is... fix-up and make playable, cheap Japanese guitars (Teisco, Silvertone etc).

Most, actually all of them, need re-fretting as the original frets are often painfully small.

I'm curious how you shimmed the neck.
Did you add or subtract wood from the neck pocket?
Thanks!

[BrianS]

That really look nice. Great job.

[alanp]

Damn nice work!

If I may ask, what was wrong with the original pickups? Those old ones typically have their own thing going on...

[George]

Very nice!

I restore... that is... fix-up and make playable, cheap Japanese guitars (Teisco, Silvertone etc).

Most, actually all of them, need re-fretting as the original frets are often painfully small.

I'm curious how you shimmed the neck.
Did you add or subtract wood from the neck pocket?
Thanks!

First you have to make the neck pocket as flat so you have a stable neck that sits flat on the guitar so i substracted a miniscule ammount of wood from the pocket (you can see this on the photo with the ruler).

Then you have to create the angle of the neck - this is tricky because the neck has to be slighlty (maybe 1 degree) backwards (a lot of people put a thick pick under the neck as shim). I cut a thin piece of wood and make it gradually thinner on the one end and then draw BMO on it you can see in the pictures the profil of the neck shim. So i add wood in the form of a shim i hope this reply makes sence

[George]

Damn nice work!

If I may ask, what was wrong with the original pickups? Those old ones typically have their own thing going on...

As you can see in photo where i  removed one of the covers, the pickup is ''hollow'' and all the parts can move and ruttle in some frequences. The metal cover it self can vibrate in some frequencies ,so when i accidentaly hit it with my hand or pick while i played i could hear a really loud thump from the amp.

This is the vibration of the metal cover cought by the magnet and in order to solve this you dip the magnet in hot wax (60% parafin & 40% beezwax) so it wont be able to move freely or when it moves when you hit it the whole pickup will move together so this result to no additional sound getting captured. Again i hope this make sence as most of the stuff i know came to me through experimenting so i am not 10000% sure about the science behind it .So i keep the pickups in order to dip them in wax later.

[George]

Also the another strange thing is that the original Potentiometers were 250k (too dark for modern humbuckers) and i dont quite remember how the humbuckers sounded as i immidiatelly removed them after i found out about the michrophonic issue. So i expect them to sound really bright on 500ks??

Any info on why the pots were  250k?

[Jebus]

Any info on why the pots were  250k?

Well, if I'd guess I would say they got them from somewhere cheaply and used those on all guitars. That's why the vintage Japanese instruments often have a lot of similar (or exactly identical) parts, even if its manufactured by some other guitar factory.

[jimilee]

Got a before shot? That looks beautiful.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[George]

I think i have one on my phone somewhere that was taken early on (not entirely untouched) - Apart from changing the pickups to coverless, moving the volume pot and cleaning the instrument the work had little visual impact. Only from really close you can see the finer details. Also i fortgot to mention that it had no bridge at all - the original bridge was lost.

[Timko]

I love the old Ibanez headstocks from the 70's with the Book shape and the script.  The guitar doesn't look too bad either .

It's totally hollow?!  I don't see a lot of 335 shaped guitars that aren't semis.

[George]

I love the old Ibanez headstocks from the 70's with the Book shape and the script.  The guitar doesn't look too bad either .

It's totally hollow?!  I don't see a lot of 335 shaped guitars that aren't semis.

Totally hollow!

To:  Jimillee

This was the oldest photo i could find - old frets old pickups but with clean bigsby and new bridge - first time with strigns so i could see watch going on.

[culturejam]

Awesome!