To keep work flowing in my shop, repairs often become a group effort. Recently, Gene Imbody, T.K. Kelly, Paul Schmittauer, and I worked to repair a beautiful ’55 Les Paul Special and GA-30 amp belonging to Jake Curtis, who inherited the set from his grandfather, Vernon Benschoter. They’re both in very good condition, and Jake asked us to give them a “68-year checkup.”

1) My first task was to replace the missing binding at the end of the fretboard.

2) Removing the neck pickup in the process, I found evidence that mice had been gnawing at the wood. I’ll get to that later.

3) I removed a piece of binding (and its ambered finish) from a donor ’50s Gibson neck that I have used several times for parts and materials.

4) It matched perfectly!

5) Another small but important fix was to re-flow the solder joint on the ground wire of the neck Tone control. The ground wire and its pool of solder were loose, but didn’t look like it. Gene found it, and after re-flowing the solder, he aged it with an etchant solution of one part ferric chloride mixed with four parts water. The wax caps are the Grey Tiger type that preceded the Bumble Bee caps Gibson started using in mid ’55. These hinted at this being one of the earliest Specials.

6) Gene inspected the toggle switch and pointed out that the double nut holding it together was covered with white powder. I asked my friend Joel Wilkins, who deals with high-end vintage guitars, and he said the nut is zinc-coated, and as it corrodes over time, it turns to zinc oxide. Since it didn’t harm the sound, we left it.

7) The bridge anchors Gibson used in the early years were only 1/2″ long (they soon switched to 7/8″), and the pull of the strings would cause the posts to lean, wobble, and often break the wood and lacquer in front of them. These were starting to loosen, and the posts and bridge were leaning forward, so I replaced them with modern anchors made of the same steel.

8) A delicate job, it took more than two hours to remove the lacquer and wood that had swelled over the anchors; once an anchor is pressed in,the wood forms over its top, so removing them requires great care to debride the wood and lacquer from the steel. The anchors are splined vertically on the outside, so the outer diameter is .518″ while the drilled hole is .500″. For debriding, I use a curette – a surgical instrument that removes material with a scraping action. It’s a wonderful guitar-repair tool for delicate work like this because it removes the finish overhanging the edge of the hole and slightly chamfers (bevels) the edge.

9) I followed the curette with a #11 X-Acto blade (with the tip broken off) to cut wood away until I could see the edges of the splines.

10) Once the spline edges were showing, I could pull the anchor out cleanly using a 1/4″ acrylic caul with a .518″ hole drilled in it to hold down the finish and wood as the extracting tool pulled the anchor loose.

11) The result is clean holes with no chip-out.

12) Next, I installed the new 7/8″-long anchors and glued them in with hot hide glue. However, the treble-side anchor was too long to install without crushing the pickup leads running below it, so I machined its length to 3/4″.

13) While the guitar was in my shop, Paul was giving the amp’s internals a thorough once-over in his shop…

14) … and T.K. set out to find a replacement handle, since this one is hanging by a thread.
Next time, we’ll replace the tuners, look at Paul’s work, and see the new handle. The neck-pickup cavity also will be fixed, but I don’t know how yet. That’s what makes my job exciting!

Dan Erlewine has been repairing guitars for more than 50 years. The author of three books, dozens of magazine articles, he has also produced instructional videotapes and DVDs on guitar repair. From 1986 through his retirement in late 2019, Erlewine was part of the R&D team, and company liaison for Stewart-MacDonald’s Guitar Shop Supply. Today, he operates a repair shop in Athens, Ohio, as well as building replicas of the guitars he made for Albert King and Jerry Garcia in 1972. This column has appeared in VG since March, 2004. You can contact him at danerlewine@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared in VG’s January 2024 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.