Nerve Wracking! Drilling into a £4,000 1967 Gibson ES-125TDC | Luthier Teardown and Repair

Greetings lovely people, welcome to Crimson Guitars. This is not the big guitar giveaway. This is Luthi's disassembly. We have a customer who gave us this beautiful Gibson and I will be here to take it apart and take a look at it. it's the es125 TDC in Sunburst, it's from

1967

. and it's on the fabulous Nick, so let's take a quick look at it, basically, poke around a little bit and see what we have, um, let's take it to the operating table. Well she is exquisitely beautiful, she is in extraordinarily good condition, there are no dings or scratches, all there is really is the ravages of time on the finish, but as we all know, they are quite pretty, so we have this beautiful color Sunburst. now it's a maple laminate top, it's an arched top obviously, so it's a laminate construction, but we have a maple front and back and then we have a mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard, everything has been stained, we have some P90 with dog ears.

We have this really simple and elegant beautiful tail piece that is original. We have a tuna Matic sitting on a wooden block with double F-shaped holes. Original scratch plate. Original binding that has acquired this beautiful yellow color. There you can see. I'm pretty sure we have a reef fret because look at those thick suction cups, they're not from the 60's and the only thing that makes me a little sad is that the tuners are not original, these are Grover tuners and the original tuners would have been plastic Peg cluson no. less now it has two P90's, it had the original the es125 T C instead of the es125 t DC it only had one pickup so the other thing I really like about this is that the customer put flat grounds on it um it just has this perverse like really vintage sound, appropriate type of double bass.

I wish you could see what Sophia is doing, she is dancing. The last thing I can say about this is that they are worth about four thousand dollars, so I have to be very careful and not say this, this is this. It's a serious instrument now I'm going to level the crown and polish this guy but don't worry I'm not going to film everything just sexy shots but we'll also take a look at the pickups just take a little look inside. just delve into it a little bit, but yeah, this is a pretty special instrument, there were only about four thousand five hundred, I think four thousand five hundred and fifty-seven or something like that, correct me in the comments, but yeah, about that and the biggest amount of these guitars shipped in one year was the year

1967

which is the year it was shipped so that was the most popular year for these guitars and that is the year of this particular guitar so anyway, blah blah blah, let's stop. talking let's take it apart now Sophia just pointed out how thin the collar is let's take a look 40 mil yeah wincy okay I just took off my threads and do you want to see something adorable under here with a piece of leather to keep? the tailpiece outside the body, guess what it is, it's a smelly old watch strap and that's sweet.

I love finding all these old treasures that I want to smell, you know, I like to smell things. I won't smell it, we ate delicious chocolate, now the other one. The interesting thing is that under our Floating Bridge we have some holes that correlate to the Tuna Matic, but I thought these always came on a wooden bridge, so I don't know why they are there. ideas, oh okay, those screws are flattened, so let's try these now. I have to admit I'm never quite sure what I expect to find under the pills, oh that's it actually, oh my gosh, but are they going to fall apart, so this is it?

Cool man, this is cool, you can see, you can see the wind, you can see the shape of the wind and the ribbon around it, that's cool, I like that and there's an absolute button of iron filings here magnetized, we should definitely clean them up. upstairs, but that's so cool, it's so nice that you can see the wines. I love that and here we have some beautiful braided wiring and some very thin wires here like strands of hair and some old stinky tape. I love everything old and stinky. things, oh, that's great, that's great, it's nice when you really find something intriguing now.

I have to admit I was expecting a center block on this, obviously I didn't do my reading because look, there's no mom, it's hollow, one of the wires coming out. of the wind is basically that the solder has fallen off the backplate, so it's held on by a thread, so we'll re-solder it. I'm having trouble with this one, the screw is so threaded that I'm really not even sure if we're going to remove it but I'll do my best and if we do we'll replace the screw because I'd like to try it sorry check the wiring in the back too.

Because if this one hangs by a thread, why wouldn't the other one be here? Here's the methacrylate cover I was talking about and inside is the wind, okay, I've become a little obsessed with this threaded screw. I can't leave it like this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a nut groove file and I'm going to try to make a new groove in there so I can take it out and throw it in the trash, so let's try against my better judgment. You could put some masking tape here to protect the surface.

I keep having to remind myself: Full Earth Full Earth Full Gram Earth in closeup this is really scary, the problem is this doesn't work, it will look horrible, but I have to try. Let's see, let's see, no, no, it hasn't worked, okay, let's try in the original space, okay, this doesn't work at all, so I'm going to drill that everyone is laughing at me, everyone who comes says haha, what Josh has to do. It's really scary, this is going to take a long time, okay, we're getting close in a minute, the thread is going to fall off now, what I really don't want to do is do kablam and go around the whole body, so let's see if I can't do that, you know?

What I really like is being able to do, just go in there and remove that screw, but your hands are too far away. Tommy has small hands. He likes to play Pokémon. Oh, he's spinning. Alright. Cool, I guess. Yeah, okay, here we go, it's off and we have another one of those cool perspex covers. Now the problem is that I have a thread there and what I thought was that it could go under it. and take it out, but there's a little bit of reinforcement, like it's right there inside the reinforcement, ah, which means I'm going to have to take all of that out, which is going to be tricky anyway, so this is something that you guys They don't need to watch it because it's boring, so I'll see you in a minute.

Ok, I'm happy to tell you that the

drilling

hell is over and I've managed to replace the screw. Sam's Whispering Help your screw. Help your screw. What I could do, maybe it doesn't depend. If I'm feeling resentful towards Sam, yeah, okay, then I'll do that, I'll do it with four screws, let's solder, okay before I close this up completely, I think I'd better try it and see what all that solder takes. . Yes, that was scary and horrible. I didn't enjoy it one bit, but it's done, so now I'm just going to do the fret work and clean up this stinky old fretboard that is totally disgusting and has about 50 years of noise on it. but don't worry, we won't force you to watch it, we'll just put on some good music, we'll do some good takes and it'll be very relaxing and then I'll see you at the end, um, when I'm going to play it, it's very important to keep the nuts clean and I like to polish them with the versatile Ultra Mega multi-purpose guitar polish.

You might be wondering why I scraped an oil on the fretboard now because I kept scratching it. I worry and then have to do it again, so I thought I'd do this first. It makes sense, and I'll never get bored avoiding prep boards. I'm like Bob Bob Ross, you know how Bob Ross never gets bored of cleaning his brushes. I never get bored of wanting the fretboards to be foreign, the foreign ones officially given life and re-polished. This thing has been sitting in this lady's um like a dresser or something on top of a closet for years and years and years.

It doesn't even have a In the case, I mean, it's a four-tail guitar in a pretty amazing Nick, but what I want to do now is give it a clean because that's just the icing on the cake. He never fails to please me by bringing these types of guitars back to life. I love it. I'm going to clean it with a fretboard and finish cleaner because this stuff doesn't contain petroleum or silicon-like products, so it's safe, but I'm going to be very careful if you're cleaning it like you would old Nitro guitars or something. that's peeling off a little bit, just be careful, but let's bring this back and then we can start singing overseas and just like that, we'll have another es125 TDC back in the game, ready to go and back in the world making music again, which which makes me very happy. happy in fact, I love doing this, I love restoring these old beauties and we do it a lot in crimson, so if you have something you want, bring it back to life, bring it to us, we don't just make guitars and tools and teach the people to play guitars, we restore guitars too, so remember that and send us your instruments because we love to get them back on track.

Let's do a little demonstration of this type. Subscribe and tell us how everything is going. Okay, guys. see you later thanks foreigner