Utterly trashed ES335...... much help will be needed.....

[David Mccarroll]

Hi guys - I took the chance and bought a fairly battered 66 -68 ES 335 husk on eBay - sent to RS Guitarworks to assess and refinish (originally Burgundy Sparkle), but Ray said the beast is just too far gone to be financially worth restoring.

So ...... I guess I am doing it myself.....

I have a lot of repair experience from my past, but this poor thing is a shambles!

Much help and advice will be required in the coming months.

pics will follow.

Help

 

[JMV]

Send it to Greg, then. His specialty is bringing back vintage guitars from the dead.

 

[David Mccarroll]

Send it to Greg, then. His specialty is bringing back vintage guitars from the dead.

I know, but RS Guitarworks estimated a $6000 sting (!!!!!!) and I am in Sydney, Australia, so Greg may not be the wisest option.

The guitar is a shambles, with delamination and major cracking/checking in the top layer of the ply on the top and back, and Roy from RS believes the centre block is loose, so some serious, serious work needs to be done. At the very least the bass side of the fingerboard binding has been not awesomely well replaced, so unless it can be fixed, that has to be replaced; the frets look to be mostly gone too.

What on Earth was I thinking?

Oh, yeah, and the Burgundy Sparkle has been pretty much long gone and replaced with about a million coats of what looks nastily like tyre black. The only remaining evidence seems to be in the pickup cavities. She sure ain't gonna ever end up in Cherry or Natural!

 

[David Mccarroll]

.............. I don't suppose anyone happens to have a spare 66 style 335 body lying around?

Wasn't someone threatening to make these at one stage?

 

[Fred]

David,I see them on ebay all the time. You might be able to make some adjustments to the replica and come up with a nice guitar.The whole kit is around 200 us dollars. I wouldn't give up.

 

[Spotcheck Billy]

I am really looking forward to this. Nothing better than raising the dead!

 

[RAG7890]

David, just a suggestion but can you please Email pics to me. I'll send them to Charles Cilia in Sydney & see what he says. He may be your best bet if you bring this back to Australia. It will not cost $6,000!

I also think I know where you can get a body from if you choose to go down this route.

Cheers, Rudi

 

[Frutiger]

If you've not got much money in it and you're confident of doing the work yourself then I'd say do it. If it needs real pro attention I'd get them to do what's necessary and then do the rest of the restoration and refinishing yourself to save cost, remembering it is what it is.

Also, in my opinion there's nothing cooler than a black ES guitar and it covers a multitud of sins too. Good luck with the project!

 

[Pete M]

Is it this one? ...Woah.

While it probably isn't financially viable to do a full professional restoration on it, I can't see any reason why it can't be made into a playable guitar once the structural issues are fixed. It's easy to see why it'd cost $6000 if you give someone a trashed body and trashed neck and ask them to make it look like a mint 335, but it all depends what your expectations are I guess. The main problem I see is if you have to take the body apart, which is a bit of a major undertaking. The binding almost looks original but missiung side dots, which has been known to happen from the factory, but replacing the binding or adding side dots would be pretty straight forward.

Forget getting a new body, that means you're putting far too much value in just the neck of this husk. If you're going to do that you may as well sell this and get an body AND neck and build a replica.

On a side note, I must need to get out more, when did sparkling burgundy become cool? In my opinion black as WAAAAAAAAY cooler!

 

[David Mccarroll]

Is it this one? ...Woah.

While it probably isn't financially viable to do a full professional restoration on it, I can't see any reason why it can't be made into a playable guitar once the structural issues are fixed. It's easy to see why it'd cost $6000 if you give someone a trashed body and trashed neck and ask them to make it look like a mint 335, but it all depends what your expectations are I guess. The main problem I see is if you have to take the body apart, which is a bit of a major undertaking. The binding almost looks original but missiung side dots, which has been known to happen from the factory, but replacing the binding or adding side dots would be pretty straight forward.

Forget getting a new body, that means you're putting far too much value in just the neck of this husk. If you're going to do that you may as well sell this and get an body AND neck and build a replica.

On a side note, I must need to get out more, when did sparkling burgundy become cool? In my opinion black as WAAAAAAAAY cooler!

Yep - that's the one.

I don't believe the body would need to be dissassembled, that's stoopid - the neck binding MAY be original, hard to say. I have all the bits (basically) to rebuild the guitar form the parts discarded by Historic Makeovers on the Les Pauls, so I am thinking stabilise the body, patch and fill where neccessary, sort out the binding and refret - I can probably do 90 - 95% of that with a bit of guidance, and I have a couple of friends who may be willing to do the respray.

I don't think Sparkling Burgundy has ever been cool, but I like custom colours. If not back to that, maybe Goldtop Gold or .......... SEAFOAM GREEN .......

 

[David Mccarroll]

................. or I could buff out and clear coat the tyre black .........

 

[ARandall]

Well, when you said utterly trashed I was expecting MUCH worse.....like neck in multiple pieces etc.

Strip the finish chemically and see where you are. It could just be a respray away from a great guitar.

Freddy had a 335 in much worse shape seemingly, where the whole top had been sanded with 65grit in order to remove a red stain - and had gone right through all the wood. I think he had to do some patching on that one.

 

[BBLong]

I can't imagine that costing $6K to restore unless you want someone to source original parts. That guitar, from the pics, at least, needs a refinish and the hardware put on. It needs a lot of work, but RSGuitarworks is expensive so that they don't get overloaded with work. They are good at what they do and everyone wants 'em to do work for them, so their price is high to keep a lot of people away. Unless there is major damage to the wood and or neck (broken truss rod?), it can be done for much less. There are a bunch of people here who can do that for much less, I would think, unless you really want period correct replacement parts, which cost a lot and would take a lot of time (time - $$) to source.

Good luck with it. Keep us posted.

Bob

 

[Frutiger]

I don't think it looks that bad - hell, just scrape the binding and it'll look a million times better, even with the cracks and dodgy paint.

I'd inject some glue into the delamination, shoot a very thin coat of black nitro over it, a couple coats of clear, buff it out, reassemble it and play it hard.

 

[David Mccarroll]

I'll post some pics of what RS Guitarworks found under the black - it's worse than it looks unfortunately.

Explains the black paint though.

 

[Frutiger]

I'll post some pics of what RS Guitarworks found under the black - it's worse than it looks unfortunately.

Explains the black paint though.

Oh, that's a shame because I think it looks pretty cool in the pics.

Good luck with the restoration, however you decide to go about it.

 

[David Mccarroll]

Hi Y'all - back to the 335 - I stripped almost all of the top, most of the neck and some of the back. After much judicious and very gentle hand sanding I sort of got frustrated and used gel strip for the bigger surfaces - workes like a charm (yes I stayed well away from the binding!). Very little Maple coming off indeed - I suppose using only 320 paper and going through tons of the stuff is helping this.

Pics will follow when I can figger out my Flikr account password again - getting old is a terrible thing

What it HAS uncovered is a huge amount of longitudinal checking/cracking of at least the top layer of the play on both the top and back - along with what appears to good ol' factory Bondo on the edge of the upper f hole - thanks Gibson!

I'll post pics later, however at the moment, the proposed solution for fixing/stabilising the longitudinal cracking is to carefully wick super thin ZAP into each crack until it stops being absorbed, do any neccessary filling then carefully sand smooth (carefully as the ZAP will most likely be harder than the wood, so no sanding of shallow spots to either side thank you).

Does anyone see an issue in this approach? Alternately does anyone have what they consider to be a possibly better approach to suggest?

There's also a rather weird looking ...... ummmm ...... repair behind the first fret involving what looks like either fiberglass resin or epoxy - then good old automotive filler - but we'll get into that later

 

[Goodcleanfun]

Hey there, if it's any help you can host/upload/link pics at Imgur. No signups, no accounts, just upload and you get a .jpg web address to link to. Save the album to your favourites and you're done

 

[emoney]

What's going on with the center block? You mentioned that RS said there's a problem there,
and were it me, that would be where all my attention is focused right now. If that's loose,
then you must find a way to secure it, otherwise you'll have much deeper problems to contend with.

 

[Spotcheck Billy]

What emoney said. It would seem the center block is the key to stabilizing the entire body.