1965 Gibson Melody Maker Guitar and Case

Beautiful guitar and case (for its age). Just needs a little work.

Found that the tuners were not original, because i found the footprint of the original tuners, and some old screw holes, underneath these newer tuners.

The holes for the small woodscrews that hold the tuners in were all pretty much stripped out, so i did the toothpick and glue hole fill trick. That seemed to work well. All the screws bite good, except for the one screw thats missing.

Note to self: I should get myself a wood screw assortment kit with every screw size and head type...

The tuner pegs themselves are made of a shiney yellow metal (brass?), and had burrs around the string holes in the pegs, which is probably why i broke a string up near the tuning peg.

I used to just shrug off a broken string, but then one day i broke like 3 in a row, same string every time, same place.

Finally i decided to inspect the guitar and tuning peg holes and discovered the burrs that were probably breaking my strings.

Now whenever i break a string, i inspect the guitar in the area where the string break happened (usually at the tuning peg or by the bridge).

So far, like 5/6 of the guitars i have inspected have had burrs or sharp edges on the tuning peg string holes, and/or at the bridge end.

On this job today i just used two diamond tip dremel bits and used them by hand like tiny files. The (brass) was soft and scratched easy, so i didn’t want to go full power tool on it and do some damage...

I was able to find a better machine screw at a shop close by, so now the tremolo is back to functioning like it should. The old screw that was in there was so long that it bottomed out on the pick guard before the tremolo even moved!

The underside of the pick guard was disgusting. I could have cleaned the pots and switch but since i tested them before i started i was fairly confident that they were ok, and i don’t like using contact cleaner unless i have to, for many reasons...

Got the guitar strap swapped out for a cotton strap.

Tried to set the bridge intonation, but the set screws ran out of adjustment. StewMac sells a bridge pin offset that might work to fix this. I honestly never noticed the intonation was off, never bothered to check!

Oiled the fretboard.

Polished the frets. There were a few areas of string wear, but they were mostly smooth and you couldn’t feel them. Where there was a burr, or any roughness, i polished it out.

The last thing i want to do cut the string ends near the peg head, and curl the ends into a nice loop, instead of leaving 6 sharp barbs ready to poke some poor soul...