​JulesStuff
1968 Egmond Kansas ES1 Guitar
I decided to restore a guitar that a friend gave me.
Here is that story through the process.
Before
After
The body had to be taken apart carefully so as not to cause further damage. This guitar was trying its best to pull itself apart from the string tension on the tail piece. The top and back had popped off the perflins and the edge in several places, with the cross spars split and needing gluing down again.
As you can see its not the best built guitar around, but I wanted to make it better to play, sound and look individual whilst keep its vintage look. .
The fret board had delaminated from the neck and several frets were deeply grooved and damaged requiring replacement, flattening and re-crowning. A few coats of oil helped the wood grain from drying up further. You can just make out were the neck and fret board was screwed into the body of the guitar through one of the fret dots.
The floating scratch board was very yellow and had to be whitened with peroxide. Here you can see the new pots in place. All the other original parts were tested and repaced. I had to cut one of the knobs off which ment finding some new close matches. Its seems they used the same knobs for their amplifiers.
In between the many coats I had drying time, this I used to clean up all the other parts incuding the tail piece. This was a boring process using rough 80 grit to very fine 3000 grit wet and dry, then a buff up.
The bridge is an off the shelf curved top and had to be altered to fit this guitars shape and fret hight.
Before gluing up the front , I strengthened the body with a wooden bar, making sure it would not interfere with the sound board properties. The neck was just bolted on with a spring to aid adjustment. Unfortunately this proved unstable and I had to place a metal piece where the neck and sound board meets and then replaced the spring with a wooden bock. This now means the neck is solid and will not move about. There is still access to the neck strut ajustment from the head side.
You can see in the pictures above that the original paint work was badly cracked so everything had to be sanded down to the wood.
There was also a lot of deep scratches and I wanted to hide all the joins and glued areas. I used filler where I could, knowing that some areas will be hidden with black and some showing the wood grain.
The back and front is covered with a few coats of red stain then the rest is sprayed with several layers of black undercoat and filler before lots of polyurathane coats. Its the sanding in between each coat that kills your arms and shoulders.
