I was brought this “Gibson” Les Paul to work on recently. I put the brand name in inverted commas because I don’t think it is a Gibson. There are a few clues: the slightly too narrow headstock shape, the slightly too thin body, the truss rod adjuster is an Allen key rather than a box spanner, and the finish is polyester rather than nitrocellulose. I think this might be an early 1980s Tokai.
No matter. It’s a lovely guitar with a mahogany body and neck, a maple top stripped back to the wood and refinished, and an ebony fretboard, but it was in a bit of a mess and needed quite a lot of work done to make it properly playable.
The first thing was to remove the old frets which were worn flat and very low, and were badly tarnished.
I removed them, sanded the fretboard to clean and level it,
and replaced the frets with Stewart-MacDonald (StewMac) #245 which, at about 2.5mm wide, are quite chunky and even after levelling and crowning are more than 1.2mm high.
They will last many years. A new nut was needed now that the frets were taller.
The pickup mounting rings had cracked, possibly because of shrinkage over the years. I thought it would be good to keep the aged ones rather than fit new ones and decided to repair them. I found that a plastic Fender-style nut blank that I had matched the radius of the pickup rings, so I cut it in half and used the pieces as splints to stabilise the rings and filled the gaps. The back of the neck pickup ring was too thin to use a splint, so I stabilised it with some masking tape soaked in superglue.
The pickup selector was broken. I replaced it with one I had one lying around that was a very similar model. The original aged nut and washer fitted perfectly.
All I had to do in the control cavity was resolder the earth wire from the bridge.
The ABR-1 bridge was missing its retaining wire, so I replaced it. When I was sanding the tarnish off the saddles it turns out the high E saddle had been replaced at some point by a brass one. I adjusted the depth of the saddle slots, by filing and sanding, so that the string heights corresponded to the radius of the fretboard.
When the owner brought the guitar to be repaired they mentioned that they were a fan of Peter Green (who isn’t?!), so I asked if they wanted the modification whereby the pickups are out of phase when they’re both on, like Green’s original Les Paul. They said yes. There are two ways to approach this mod: either you can swap the hot and cold wires of the neck pickup where they’re soldered to the volume pot, or you can rotate the magnet in the neck pickup 180°. As the covers were already off the pickups on this guitar I decided to do the latter. I loosened the screws on the base plate of the neck pickup, which is a 1980s Gibson Patent Applied For (PAF) reissue (the bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan SH-1), and gently eased the magnet out with a nail file, rotated it, eased it back in, and tightened the screws.
Then it was just a matter of setting the guitar up and getting it back to its owner, who seemed very pleased with the results. Quite a lot of work, but this was a fun and satisfying job.
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