We All Started Somewhere.....

This was my very first guitar.  My parents gave it to me for my 10th birthday in '65, in the middle of the British envasion.  They ultimately learned to regret this but that is a story for another time.  I never had a case for it and before I learned about working on guitars, I wrapped it in a blanket and took it on boat trips, road trips up and down the west coast, into the woods, and everywhere else I went for 25 years.  Flash forward to 10 or so years ago and I decided to put this back to as good a shape as I was able.  All electronics out (the old single coils were so microphonic that I had to stand at just the right angle to my amps or it would hum and wail like it was being tortured (which, in retrospect, maybe it was).  Anyway, I stripped it to it's bare bones, re-glued a couple of minor delams, sanded lightly, and shot two new coats of lacquer on it.  Just enough to make it shine brightly again while retaining most of the "history" left behind from all of those aforementioned trips we took together.  The neck was stripped of frets, ruts removed, fret board re-radiused, refretted, sanded and re-lacquered.  New vintage tuners too.  All new insides from pots to pickups which wound up being a set of Bill Lawrence L-250's, single coil sized humbuckers which tamed the noise once and for all.  A new Bigsby to replace the import trem and a new adjustable bridge and I was ready to set it up and see what all of this revealed.  The results were much more than I expected, and even today, I enjoy pulling this out and plugging it in to show people just what is possible, and to bring back that feeling I had as a teen playing my first real guitar.  There is something about having the L-250's in conjunction with a hollow body guitar that nets a sound that is unlike anything else I have.  And even though I spent a couple of weeks and around $250 in parts (my parents spent $49 for it brand new) I love pulling it out and letting it ring out regularly.  61 years old, light as a feather, looks good, sounds great, perfectly intonated, and stays in tune....no more love/hate relationship with my #1.  Always makes me smile!!

The last pic is of my Norma with a friend's Aria hollow body, two beautiful mid sixties hollow body Japanese guitars that started things out for both of us way back when.  I had the privilege of putting the Aria back into playing shape for him and it became a bond we will share going forward.