Post by seagullplayer on Sept 9, 2019 13:04:03 GMT -5
The Gibson listed in my signature is an early 70's J-40.
Good specs on them are hard to find and seem to include a lot of general notions about them.
Mine was given to me when a friend passed away about 2006. It hung on the wall of a spare bedroom for years. At some point it gave way to the low RH our house sees over the winter. And the bridge completely pulled loose from the top.
I put it away for "safe keeping" three or four years ago. And kind of forgot about it. I never thought it played very well and thought the tone was really dull. I had much better playing and sounding guitars so fixing a mediocre guitar was pretty low on my list of things to do.
I will never sell the guitar so I knew one day I would have it looked at. Last week I saw a post by a local guy I know that works on guitars. He did a set-up for me once and was very reasonable and did a great job. I contacted him about the Gibson and he said he would take a look at it.
I told him I was just looking at getting the guitar playable again. But didn't plan to use it much. If he could just get the bridge back together enough to hold light gauge strings I would be happy. I told him I found the guitar to always sound rather dull and considered it one of the Gibson duds from that era.
The bridge is "pin-less". He said it was not the first he had seen come off. He said he could fix it so it would never come off again by adding two pins through the bridge plate itself.
He contacted me a couple days later and said it was ready and that it had come out "great".
If I had not dropped it off myself I would never have believed it was the same guitar. It plays like butter but the way it now sounds! It is fantastic, even with the lighter gauge strings it still has good projection and a really nice bottom end. I can't put it down.
It has no pick-up system, I don't plan to add one either. But it was able to cover our small Church Sunday evening without problem. He said he would not be afraid to go up on string gauge if I wanted. I'm not sure yet, I'm going to play it awhile and see how it goes. The neck is in good shape, but it is 40 some years old, if I don't need to add the stress to it, why would I.
His skill in setting it up makes it now play so well. But I think it might have been the way he secured the bridge that changed to tone so much for the better? Whatever it was, this thing has new life and will have a few stories to tell before I'm done.
If you look close you can see the small chip missing from the top between the bridge and pic guard. I couldn't find it when I looked for it. But I think it just adds to the story.