alk-3
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- Jan 8, 2008
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Hey everyone. I just wanted to show everyone this latest conversion. It came to me as a complete, but pretty butchered '53.
The original plan was to keep the top, but it had been very badly over-sanded at some point. It was pretty badly abused with terrible fretwork, part of the neck binding was missing and it had been refinished at least once, probably several times.
We decided to do a full on conversion to '59 specs. This included moving the logo up to the proper location, replacing the top, resetting the neck at a steeper angle to accommodate the later bridge, filling the p-90 routs in the mahogany and routing for humbuckers, replacing the missing binding etc.
We wanted this to be a dead on conversion so we spent a fair bit of time getting the tooling correct for the cavities as well. There are a couple of tells to keep this from being a 100% accurate, which include the filled, but visible grounding channel in the control cavity, the hole for the ground wire at the strap button, but otherwise the rest has been modified.
We kept the original inlays as well, and worked very hard to keep the sheen on the original fretboard (which is always a dead give-away on reworked vintage guitars).
Hope you like it!
(I should mention that I don't advocate converting early les pauls just for the sake of converting them, however my feelings are that if the guitar had been butchered beyond original salvageable condition, it serves the guitar well to make it into a playable guitar to be enjoyed for the next 50 years and beyond. Please keep this in mind when commenting on this thread. We have enough of the arguements for and against conversions in several other threads
and I do see the points of both sides.)
BEFORE
AFTER
The original plan was to keep the top, but it had been very badly over-sanded at some point. It was pretty badly abused with terrible fretwork, part of the neck binding was missing and it had been refinished at least once, probably several times.
We decided to do a full on conversion to '59 specs. This included moving the logo up to the proper location, replacing the top, resetting the neck at a steeper angle to accommodate the later bridge, filling the p-90 routs in the mahogany and routing for humbuckers, replacing the missing binding etc.
We wanted this to be a dead on conversion so we spent a fair bit of time getting the tooling correct for the cavities as well. There are a couple of tells to keep this from being a 100% accurate, which include the filled, but visible grounding channel in the control cavity, the hole for the ground wire at the strap button, but otherwise the rest has been modified.
We kept the original inlays as well, and worked very hard to keep the sheen on the original fretboard (which is always a dead give-away on reworked vintage guitars).
Hope you like it!
(I should mention that I don't advocate converting early les pauls just for the sake of converting them, however my feelings are that if the guitar had been butchered beyond original salvageable condition, it serves the guitar well to make it into a playable guitar to be enjoyed for the next 50 years and beyond. Please keep this in mind when commenting on this thread. We have enough of the arguements for and against conversions in several other threads
and I do see the points of both sides.)BEFORE
AFTER
Great job! 
but I already have one conversion 
