1952 Gibson J-45 Slope Dreadnought Guitar
This is, now, quite a killer guitar. It arrived at the shop pretty downtrodden, though. So much was wrong with it! I'm glad it's now full-circle and back in action for the owner, however, because it's got that classic J-45 sound to it and all of its healed wounds give it the look of a grumpy old friend.
Work included a neck reset and stabilization (made tricky by a previously-split heel "repair" and epoxy lather that spread all the way into the inside of the neckblock), a variety of crack repairs to the top (though some of the cracks were cleated), regluing most of the bracing in the guitar, a level/dress of the frets, new bone nut and saddle, and setup work. It took me an age to get this all done between all the other chaos of the shop and I did let it sit idle now and then every time I found yet another piece of loose bracing to glue.
The work on the heel and joint was the worst bit. Because of the old epoxy everywhere in the joint, I could never get the bottom 2/3 of the heel removed so I had to do the repair with it in place. That meant shimming the neck angle back and regluing the top part of the neck as if I were gluing a Strat neck in place on an acoustic. This worked and I've had to do it before on similarly-screwed-up Gibsons (there was an L-00 and also an LG-2 that had similar damage), but this one was a little hairier. I wound-up double-bolting the neck through its heel on this one as well and left some very obvious, ugly plugs at the bottom of the heel so the next guy who needs to work on it 50+ years down the line knows what's up.
My favorite silliness with this guitar was finding the upper-bout top ladder brace had been reglued over an old cleat to a crack up there, leaving half of its length unglued and hanging in the air. It was emblematic of the mess that was in there and needing to be addressed everywhere...
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