JPF Home Page Forums Musician Gear and Techniques Guitars and Guitarist Forum The ONE that got away...

I used to have an old 1935ish Gibson ES150 that I bought cheap at a shop in Houston that was badly damaged. Someone had dropped it with the cable plugged in and smashed the side in at the jack. I tried my hand at repair figuring it never had any collector value since it was so badly damaged. I managed to restore the side with epoxy and it was stronger than before the damage.

It had been played so much through the years that the wood between almost all the frets up to the twelfth was scalloped badly, so decided to shave the fretboard down and try my hand at refretting. I was just beginning to attempt repairs on guitar and this was an instrument for me to practice on. I pulled out the old frets and shaved down the fretboard. I did manage to pull up a few chips from the face of the fretboard in the process of removing the frets, but I shaved it down nicely. I only had jumbo fretwire, and I should have found some exactly like what I removed, but the tang was wider so I had to widen the grooves for the frets. When I set the new frets they really did not sit flush with the wood when I set them in place. This was my first attempt at fretting an instrument, so it wasn't a beautiful job, but I dressed and finished the frets very well and when I was finished the guitar played fabulously. The big pick-up on it had a raw killer blues-rock sound. I did not have it for a full year after finishing the work on it before someone broke into my apartment and stole it along with much of my stuff, including my saxophone, 1964 Epiphone 12 string, my stereo equipment and about two-thirds of my one-time fairly large record collection.

Of course I was very dissappointed to lose all those things, but the one thing I would love to get back more than all the rest is that old ES-150. I haven't seen it it 30 years or more, but I think I would still recognize it in a heartbeat.