1961 Southern Jumbo Restoration Pt 4

As work continues, we get to hear the guitar for the first time in months

- Huw Price

With most restoration projects there comes a point where the guitar looks worse rather than better.

Although the look and feel of the back and sides was much improved, stripping the top had revealed two significant cracks and plugged pickup screw holes on each side of the soundhole. A couple more screw holes on the lower bout may be evidence of a pickup control module having once been attached, and there was a deep dent adjacent to the tailblock. Thankfully, the sunburst finish should conceal most of the damage.

Having been subjected to bleaching, dampening and several sanding cycles, the spruce top was ready for spraying. With sunbursts, the edge binding and soundhole rings have to be masked off. Conventional masking tape doesn't conform to curves, so I used 6mm vinyl tape instead. Rather than take it up to the inside edge of the binding, I used the innermost black layer as a guide for the tape. My plan was to scrape the binding after spraying the sunburst to reveal the innermost white layer.

The soundhole rings presented more of a challenge because vinyl tape in the UK comes in metric widths, but Gibson’s materials all conformed to imperial measurements. Instead of importing vinyl tape from the US, I used 3mm tape and some thinner whiteboard grid tape for the wider ring, and I cut the 6mm tape down to the approximate width for the narrower ring. I also resigned myself to some tricky lacquer scraping to finesse the edges.