In a bid to relinquish myself of the title “Captain Of The Crazy Train” I’ve picked up during the sunken fretboard project, I decided I would take a little bit of time away from Cigar Box Guitar projects and have a bit of a tinker with a guitar I had put aside for this very purpose. 

During a total blackout couple of weeks, apparently I went on a total bender buying beaten up guitars from all over the place, the stranger the better. One of the guitars I picked up was a lawsuit era CBS LP Copy from around 1977-78-79…MID TO LATE 70’S. Before I went to pick it up I was sent a picture from the seller, and thought it looked in okay-ish condition, obviously missing a heck of a lot of hardware but, I was still okay with that. 

I was pretty into it even though the picture was not the best way to judge it so, I jumped in the car and took a 40 minute drive to buy it from him. Look, I’m not going to say the guy had lied about anything but, he had certainly bent the truth to the point that I think he must have made an art form of it over the years. The finish was, as expected pretty messy, scratched hazed, crazed, dinged and other short words to describe shite. That I knew, but the neck was what threw me, the thing looked like a roller coaster, twisting one way before a giant drop the other. I was actually pretty disappointed as I was looking forward to a vintage Japanese LP copy with a zero fret. I beat his price down as far as I could take it, I was pretty sure he was getting a tad angry at my appraisal, as he had originally wanted hundreds of dollars for what he thought must have been a rare find. Anyway with a price agreed upon I took it home and pulled it apart, the neck (bolt on) was something I worked on fixing up for about 2 months before calling it a day and putting the whole thing away.

Fast forward about 5 months and with a new outlook on it I have started working on it again. The neck is now long gone which is a shame but it was way past gone as far as fixing was concerned. There is something about the body though that I love, it’s semi hollow bodied and has a really nice tone to it, I have no idea what the timber is but I’d hazard a guess at cheapwood, but that doesn’t matter, I am totally into this thing. I didn’t want to do a complete refinish on it as it’s a bit past that point and hell, it’s an old guitar, so I will leave it looking old - ish. Some of the paint job had been really scratched up and it looked like someone had taken to it at some point with a screwdriver to further age it or something, anyways, I wanted to get the finish looking nice again, not factory, just, nice and clean, so out with the 1000 grit and steel wool. 

Before - 

After sanding and steel wool - 

By this point I was thinking of trying a Matte Finish but it’s really not as simple as just scuffing up a gloss paint job with steel wool, that in actual fact with simply goof up your guitar. So that idea long forgotten, I would stick to a gloss finish and, would get to all of that soon but first… 

Yeah the back had a little bit of buckle rash I guess… This, I have now taken back to natural timber, stained and started coating with Danish Oil. There was no way in hell I wanted to do a paint matching job on this one as, the whole point was for this to be a bit of a relaxing process. 

So it’s a bit too dark right now to take any more photo’s so I’ll get on that in the morning but I will say, it has in fact so far been a real treat just to work on something with no deadline or sense of purpose, just taking it easy.