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Trapeze Goldtop refin thread and undoing a partial conversion back to trapeze (PICS)

buyusfear

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Oct 3, 2006
Messages
2,951
Who's up for watching me try and bring this guitar back to its former glory?

My buddy inherited this from his uncle, who had purchased it back in the 80's possibly? We don't know, maybe early 90's late 70's, semantics. The deal from the then seller was, "Why don't you invest in this old Les Paul, but let me make it shiny and new and playable, by adding a shaved ABR and stop tail, and...shielding paint and a rats nest of wiring?"

Lot's a face palms with this one, especially today when I stripped it; however, overall the bones are good.

Thankfully the owner has asked that we make it a trapeze again. He played a '53 trapeze with a MojoAxe tailpiece and loved it; who wouldn't?"
The neck was never reset thankfully, so it's just a case of plugging some holes and fixing the nasty mess going on with the headstock veneer/face.
The pickups are original thankfully, but the leads were butchered as you'll see. The only other original parts are the ground wire spaghetti tubing (go figure on that one), rear ABS brown cavity cover plates and the pickguard & bracket.
I'm actually looking forward to this.

refinished-1952-les-paul-2_orig.jpg


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early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase12_orig.jpg


refinished-1952-les-paul-27_orig.jpg


This is it next to a stock '53 trapeze with MojoAxe

refinished-1952-les-paul-4_orig.jpg
 
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buyusfear

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Oct 3, 2006
Messages
2,951
Some more pics of the shielding paint and super high tech wiring.

early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase05_orig.jpg


early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase08_orig.jpg


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You can see the original gold inside the pup cavities
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early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase14_orig.jpg


early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase14_orig.jpg


I'll have to make a new nylon nut as well.

early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase01_orig.jpg


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refinished-1952-les-paul-25_orig.jpg


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hogy

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Nov 4, 2005
Messages
715
That truss rod scares me. I would investigate that first.
 

buyusfear

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Oct 3, 2006
Messages
2,951
That truss rod scares me. I would investigate that first.

Good call out. I noticed that right off the bat when the owner brought it to me as it was without a truss rod cover. While it’s definitely the longest truss rod I’ve seen, I tightened it and it worked great.
I’m debating grinding off some length as a standard truss rod wrench barely grabs the brass nut. And that’s only because of the vintage style short tapered nut.
 

hogy

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Nov 4, 2005
Messages
715
Good call out. I noticed that right off the bat when the owner brought it to me as it was without a truss rod cover. While it’s definitely the longest truss rod I’ve seen, I tightened it and it worked great.
I’m debating grinding off some length as a standard truss rod wrench barely grabs the brass nut. And that’s only because of the vintage style short tapered nut.


I would bet money it didn't start out like that. It either stretched that much, or the anchor crushed the wood in front of it.

Every time I've seen this, one of two things are true:

1. The neck is very soft and weak and needs a ton of help from the truss rod to stay straight.

2. The rod wasn't installed correctly from the factory. It needs to be installed in a curve to be effective, and it's curved by the maple spline. I've seen perfectly straight splines in guitars with excessive truss rod stretch like this one.

The missing truss rod cover is another hint. It might have had to be taken off so frequently to tighten the rod again that somebody finally didn't bother putting it on anymore.


I would take that board off and investigate before I did any finish work.
 

P.Walker

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Apr 17, 2007
Messages
941
I would bet money it didn't start out like that. It either stretched that much, or the anchor crushed the wood in front of it.

Every time I've seen this, one of two things are true:

1. The neck is very soft and weak and needs a ton of help from the truss rod to stay straight.

2. The rod wasn't installed correctly from the factory. It needs to be installed in a curve to be effective, and it's curved by the maple spline. I've seen perfectly straight splines in guitars with excessive truss rod stretch like this one.

The missing truss rod cover is another hint. It might have had to be taken off so frequently to tighten the rod again that somebody finally didn't bother putting it on anymore.


I would take that board off and investigate before I did any finish work.

+1

I bet OP is quite aware of this as well (I love his builds), and it is one of many signs that a neck has definitely changed shape (by bowing forwards excessively).

The front anchor near the nut may not be as bad (although that's where the anchor is protruding) as the rear end of the actual anchor underneath the butt end of the fretboard. 99% wood compression involved. The threads on the rods actually extend quite far down, so it's not a surprise that OP was able to tighten it.

Some variation is okay, but that is an anomaly.

Regardless, fantastic thread and subscribed :salude
 

buyusfear

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Oct 3, 2006
Messages
2,951
So this is where it gets interesting regarding what happened to the face of the headstock. I say face because the back of it is pretty much untouched.
The best guesses so far are a drill through on tuner mounting screws at some point when swapping tuners and then tried to fix the damaged holy veneer? Only because of their placement does this kind of make sense. But I do open that one up for guesses.

I use a soy based stripping gel I found at Lee Valley. It's super safe to use in closed quarters with no respirator and is much milder on the delicate parts like binding. It's pretty gnarly with celluloid, so I take extra care to cover the neck binding and inlays, but working away from the body binding and working quickly, it performs quite well.

early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase25_orig.jpg


Spreading it out just shy of the binding, I let it sit for 30-40 min.
early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase27_orig.jpg


early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase24_orig.jpg


At this point I was like WTF?
Explained why the "N"s tail was missing.
early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase28_orig.jpg


early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase29_orig.jpg


Really trying my hand at cleaning out the shielding paint in the cavities
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mdubya

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Joined
Mar 31, 2010
Messages
1,020
I would be tempted to do a low profile wraparound.

But I resoundingly approve of your preservation of the guitars true origins. :3zone

Sub'd. :peace2
 

Tom Wittrock

Les Paul Forum Co-Owner
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Aug 2, 2001
Messages
42,567
Those extra holes match the locations of the screw holes mounting the Klusons. :wah
 

toxpert

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Jul 2, 2005
Messages
3,068
Looks to me like alcohol and a power drill were used to fix stripped out screw holes for the tuners.
Lots of alcohol.
:dang
 

buyusfear

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Oct 3, 2006
Messages
2,951
Those extra holes match the locations of the screw holes mounting the Klusons. :wah

Yeah, further to my post on that being the best guess so far, I'm tending to agree more with this hypothesis that someone eff'd up, and then was like, well... lets refine this whole bad boy and fix the trapeze issue as well.

I'm debating now whether to route out the epoxy filler used on those face holes and inlay with holly, or leave well enough alone and stabilize with CA. :hmm
Funny how a job goes from, "Yeah, the "N's" little hook was probably just not scraped back during the previous refin, that should be easy enough to fix" to "Houston, we have a problem"
 

buyusfear

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Oct 3, 2006
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Here's a recap of how I handled plugging the ABR and Stoptail holes.

While I worked on stripping the guitar I glued up some maple and mahogany with UF glue to maintain period correctness. May have been slight overkill, but I figured, if you're gunna do something, do it right? And I didn't have to go out of my way for the materials.

Really, the most important thing to do in my opinion is to NOT use dowels. Dowels means end grain, and that is a much different animal than what the holes need. This can be quite tedious for the ABR 6/32 sized holes, but, you take it slow and its not so bad.

early-no-serial-52-stripping-phase15_orig.jpg


Once dry I use a plug cutter and make up some plugs.
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Once glued in I shave them down with a small block plain and finish the flush cut with an old finishing trick; where I strike a bur into a new razor blade and wrap the ends with tape; creating a micro shaving plane.

early-no-serial-52-plugging-top-phase1_orig.jpg


For the ABR holes I've found it's easiest to take an offcut of the plug material and quickly sand it as small as I can on the belt sander before chucking it into my drill and kinda mini-lathing it to final shape

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Here you can see how many attempts it took the original perp to get the ABR in the right spot.
early-no-serial-52-plugging-top-phase7_orig.jpg
 
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Fan of LP

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Jan 8, 2017
Messages
181
Wow! This is a fantastic thread! Thank you so much for taking the time to document the process and share it with us.
 

CDaughtry

Les Paul Forum Co-Owner and Moderator
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Jul 16, 2001
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12,646
I'm digging the exquisite photos as much as the mastery they are capturing.:jim
 

miserneil

Active member
Joined
Dec 14, 2010
Messages
149
Great thread! SO pleased to see this going back to original and not 'the other' way... :salude
 

RyanC

Member
Joined
Nov 16, 2009
Messages
233
Incredible work so far. Wow.

I know it’s easy for me to say, but those plugs in the headstock and the damaged inlay would make me think about replacing the entire piece of holly...

Subscribed!
 
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