1951 Gibson L-48/ES-125 Conversion Hollowbody Electric Guitar

July 19, 2018

1951 Gibson L-48/ES-125 Conversion Hollowbody Electric Guitar

This old bruiser entered my life via a consignor who'd wanted me to fix this up to sell. It came in with a totally-collapsed top, aftermarket '60s Japanese pickup and homebrew pickguard screwed to the top, one top brace split in two places and rattling around on the inside, and the other top brace randomly glued down (with an almighty spray of glue) to the back of the guitar. It also needed a refret as the frets in positions 1-7 were worn right into the board. Someone obviously loved this guitar and (in a folksy way) tried to keep it going.

Suffice to say, fixing this to sell as a 1951 L-48 meant removing the back, making new top braces, gluing them up, and giving it a refret. That's costly work for a guitar that the market "wants" $1,200-1,400 for but mostly gets $800-900... and even then the new braces wouldn't be original and the top had already sunk 1/8" to 3/16" in the center. He offered to sell it to me and -- I'll be honest -- I wasn't sure I wanted to bother. I do love Gibsons, though, so I bit.

I didn't want to get stuck in the rut of 100% overhaul, so I decided to do what I would do with this and converted it into an electric along the lines of an ES-125 (but different). Three soundposts (similar to the build Nat'l used on their New Yorkers in the '40s) shored-up the top after removing the remains of the original bracing. I then planed and dressed the fretboard and refretted with StewMac jumbo "pyramid" frets. Its original tuners were a mixed set from '51 into '53 and so I replaced them with some antiqued Gotoh Kluson-style tuners I had on hand. The missing truss rod cover was replaced with one from my bins.

After that I cut the cavity for the pickup and installed it and a fully-shielded wiring harness with just one volume control (and a cool old brown radio knob to top it). The pickup itself is actually a Seymour Duncan SH-1B retro-flavored humbucker that I've mounted in a dogear P90 cover. Since I have this strung with 56w-13 gauges with a wound G, the sound this guitar produces is a quintessential, '50s/'60s-sounding jazz flavor that you might expect from an ES-175. The soundposts give it a hair more sustain and clarity, though. Action is set at a hair-under 3/32" EA and 1/16" DGBE at the 12th fret.

After setting it up and stringing it, I left the guitar for a couple days and, hey! -- it's stable as heck. The action has not budged and the top is not changing at all. The neck is also dead-straight and hasn't needed adjustment at all even with those big gauges and many years of disuse. Let's face it, though: this guitar is not original but its tone and feel is still Gibson home-base. Who doesn't love the necks on these? The pyramid jumbo frets give it a touch that makes the big strings feel like 11s with a wound G instead of 13s, too.

Specs are: 24 3/4" scale length, 1 11/16" nut width, 1 1/2" string spacing at the nut, 2" spacing at the bridge, 16 1/8" lower bout, 11 1/2" upper bout, and 3 3/8" side depth at the endblock. The neck has a medium C-shaped back profile with a straight 12" radius to the board.

Woods are: ply mahogany top, solid mahogany sides, ply maple back, mahogany neck, and rosewood fretboard and bridge. The dots are pearl and there's cream binding at the top and back edges of the body.

While the sunburst to the top looks pretty obvious in these outdoor shots, the video shows what it looks like inside -- a guitar that almost looks black save a deep-brown patch in the middle.

The nut is original.

I tried to go for a "weird Gibson transitional vibe" to the pickup look by using a scratched-up cover from my parts bin that I'd drilled for a different humbucker's poles sometime last year. I de-soldered the cover on the Duncan pickup and then used the holes in the second coil's bobbin usually reserved for the back mounting plate screws to mount this one to the cover directly from the top. It works!

I rarely use a tone control and use my volume control simply as a cut-off for tuning -- hence the 1-volume approach.

While the top is still a little lower than where it would've been originally, there was enough thread to just re-use the original bridge posts and jack the bridge saddle/topper up to compensate. I may install longer posts at some point, however, just to have a little more grab.