Tokai Love Rock Les Paul 1959 Relic LS75F

This Tokai Les Paul came in requiring a fret dress to remove 10 years of playing wear. This is LS75F a Japanese model made specifically for the UK market. 24 pcs were made circa 2002. A very nice clone of a '59 Gibson Les Paul. The guitar was advertised as having a solid maple top - and it does.



Traditionally Les Pauls have a book-matched flamed maple top (two pieces split) sitting on a mahogany body. The balance of maple-to-mahogany thickness and ratio is important to get that classic Les Paul sound. On closure inspection of this maple top the centre line of the flame does not match the maple cap under it.



The flame is actually a veneer on top of the plainsawn maple cap. Sawmills create plainsawn lumber by cutting a log lengthwise with a series of parallel cuts. This system provides excellent yield because it minimizes scrap, but plainsawn wood does not provide the kind of flamed top seen classic Les Paul models. A pretty veneer cover is a good way for manufacturers to save money. Whether it has a negative effect on the sound is debatable.

2003 Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster - One Piece Alder Body/Sperzel Tuners

The Fender Custom shop are renowned for their great quality guitars, but they would greatly improve the playability of their models by paying more attention to final set-up process. The nut channels had been incorrectly cut parallel to the strings. A guaranteed way to nail those Ravi Shanker sounds!



Since 1987 the Fender Custom Shop has produced special-order, limited edition guitars for their customers. Much of the output is replicated vintage models such as the Fender Relic series, complete with scratches and general signs of abuse. You can spec anything you want - body-and-neck woods (type and grade of wood), matching headstock veneers, fingerboard-inlay designs, fingerboard radius, neck size and shape - Every single element of the guitar can be custom ordered.



This 2003 Custom Shop Strat has a one piece alder body, Noiseless pickups, one piece maple neck and Sperzel locking machine heads. The owner Sam felt there were some set-up issues with the guitar including some fret buzz around the 9th fret and a harmonic sitar-like sound when playing the unwound strings in the open position. There were was also 10 years of fret wear and grooves that needed dressing.



This neck has very pretty birds-eye feathering in the maple. The guitar is finished in nitro-cellulose lacquer. The neck had been finished after the frets had been installed. There was still some of this lacquer covering the edges of some of the frets. This needed scraping before the frets could be dressed.

1966 Fender Stratocaster Neck with Rosewood Fingerboard.

This is a Fender Strat neck made way back in September 1966. It was produced one year after Leo Fender sold his company to the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS for $13 million.



The '13' refers to the particular model (in this case a Strat) not the date as some people believe. The last letter refers to the neck width where "A" is the narrowest, "B" is normal, and "C" is the widest.



By 1966 (a year after CBS bought Fender), CBS management had really taken hold of Fender's production facilities and incorporated many changes. The sum of of all these changes had a serious effect on Fender guitars as a whole. 1966 brought an era of "large" headstocks, less contoured bodies, and much higher production numbers. CBS looked for ways to cut production time and costs, which generally led to much lower quality. Because of this, 1966 and later Fender instruments are considered far less collectible than vintage pre-CBS Fender guitars.



For contrast, here is a rosewood neck from the year before. You can clearly see just how much thicker the rosewood slab is. The '66 neck has quite a slim veneer.

Still, it is a very beautiful slab of Indian Rosewood with very little nail wear. The board has a 7.5" radius (or curvature - the flatter the board the higher the number). 7.5" is a very comfortable radius for playing chords as the radius follows the curvature of the players hand. It is not too helpful for bending notes as strings can 'choke-out' if the action is too low.



The lacquer checking on this neck is all in one direction and runs right the way down its length. Over time and with more rapid changes in temperature, wood expands faster than the finish and leads to these spider web cracks in the finish.



1966 was the year Fender introduced this larger headstock shape. Leo Fender still worked for the company after the takeover and personally designed the larger headstock to stand out. There are numerous theories as to why he did this;

-To immediately differentiate between CBS and Pre-CBS instruments and for enabling a larger, more eye catching logo.

-Standardization. Most of their other guitars had big headstocks at the time. From a production (and yes, cost) standpoint, it made sense to standardize.

-Branding. The Stratocaster (and it's small headstock) had no huge cache (yet) then. It was the Fender brand that was most important in the guitar-boom 60's and the headstock shape defined this from distance, so why not make it larger like other models. Plus, it gave more room to use the more-modern, much more-readable Bold Italic font, which helped branding also and was easier to produce.

Yasuma 130 Newance Acoustic Guitar and JLD Bridge Doctor

[If you have a Yasuma model, please get in touch.]



This 1970s Japanese 130 is in a right old sorry state. It has a pretty bad belly hump behind the bridge. 40 years of string tension (200 lbs with medium gauge strings-!) is pulling the rosewood bridge towards the headstock and taking the rest of the top with it.



The main symptom of this being the action is so far away from the frets the guitar is totally unplayable.



This is the second Yasuma I've worked on this year. They have loads of Japanese MOJO and sound just as good as the highly sort after Yamaha red label guitars of the same era. This 130 is another Martin D28 copy. The neck is V shaped and the whole guitar is finished in nitro cellulose lacquer - something not found on mid priced guitars manufactured today.



In the 1970s Japanese manufacturers began to get more serious with companies even attempting to pass themselves off as American brands such as Martin. These were high-quality and looked too close for comfort to the real thing. The Yasuma Musical Instrument Company was one of many who fell foul of US litigation and were ultimately put out of business.



The solution comes from JDL Guitars in Roswell, New Mexico - but probably not back engineered alien technology from a crashed space ship.



"The JDL bridge doctor fits underneath the bridge inside the guitar and is adjusted to counteract the pull of the strings and the soundboard distortion. The top is pulled flat and a playable action has been restored. The strings exert proper downward pressure on the saddle - enabling them to transmit more vibration to the instrument. The Bridge System is also acting as a soundpost - transferring string vibration to the body woods directly from the bridge.

Aside from a small bridge hole, the guitar is completely unmodified and is not only easy to play, it will now have more volume and sustain and a richer tone than it ever has before."



One small screw in the centre of the bridge. Later will be countersunk and covered with MOP inlay.



A shot of the inside. The bridge doctor is then tensioned using an allen key.



Now the action is a little lower the frets can be dressed and the guitar setup correctly.



Leveling the top of the frets. This guitar has been re-fretted with Gibson jumbo gauge wire.



After leveling, re-crowning and several different grades of micro abrasives, the frets start to get shiny.



As you can see here the bridge is now at the correct angle with out the body hump that was tilting it forward.



All strung back together.

UPDATE 1:-

Glen from Toronto sent through a few pictures of his Yasuma Newance with a very similar belly hump.

UPDATE 2:-

John Sterry sent through a few pictures of the Yasuma Newance he picked up on Gumtree. Quite a bargain !

Wesley Phoenix Les Paul Semi Hollow-Body

This is a 2008 Wesley semi-acoustic LP. The guitar is in pretty good condition, but the owner wants a fret dress to remove some wear on the first few frets. Here the fretboard is masked ready for a deluxe set-up and fret dress. The bridge has been removed and both pickups wound down below the height of the fretboard.



When using leveling blocks it is important to mask the fretboard to protect the rosewood from any debris removed from the frets. The nut has also been removed so we can level all the frets evenly.



Adjusting the trussrod to get the neck as straight as possible is essential.



A few passes with a 24" heavyweight steel beam precision-ground for flatness. I am using 400-grit 3M abrasive on the block.



Once the tops of the frets have been leveled, I use a crowning file to ensure the string will contact the middle of the fret when played. Playing on square fret tops will cause intonation problems.



Once the frets have been re-crowned it is time to dress the frets with varying grades of successively finer abrasive paper. 400, 600, 800, 1200, 1500, 2000, micro mesh, polishing compound, and finally chamois leather. This is arguably the most time consuming part of a fret dress but is essential for a good uniform dress. The leveling and crowning stages will add fine scratches to the frets which need to be polished out by hand.