1975 Ovation 1615 12-String Guitar

My friend Heather dropped this guitar off to get turned-around into a working instrument again. She scored it really cheap, which was nice, because it needed a lot of heavy-handed tweaking to get it running nicely. I've always liked these 12-fret, 1615 model Ovations, though, so I was pleased to get it working for her. They're lightly-built, have fast, comfortable, and stable necks, and have a forward, crisp, woody sort-of tone going for them.

Like a lot of these, it had a bad kink-up/ramp-up in the fretboard where it meets the body. I leveled that out of the extension frets with some struggle and then proceeded to do a bunch of fret-seating and level/dressing. Next-up was to test the original pickup -- which had both a bad element in the bridge saddle and also a bad preamp and controls throughout the rest of it. I swapped that for a single K&K dot sensor pickup wired to a passive volume control in the same location (and with the same knob) as the original. The next bit was just setup -- a restring and some compensation/adjustment to the saddle.

I used, basically, electric 12-string gauges -- 20w/42w, 15/32w, 10/22w, 8/16, 12/12, 9/9 -- because it's built light enough that it sounds good with them, it's mostly going to be a strummer, and it relieves tension on the somewhat-underbuilt neck joint. 

Other things about this particular guitar? It has a few repaired/sealed hairline cracks on the top, the finish is checked all over, and it has a full set of individual-unit sealed tuners. Very few 12-strings at the time had as accurate machines on them and it's nice to have "modern" functionality out of a "fully vintage" guitar in that respect.