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Please help! I need to find out more about this guitar. What is it? The owner says it is a Gibson but I am not so sure. It looks a lot better in the pics than it does in person. There has been A LOT of work done to this thing. The finish has been poorly redone several times; it is actually sticky (so bad you have to wash your hands after holding it). There are no markings in the guitar. The back is rather flat, it has a sound post, and it looks like if you clean off the finish there might be some figure on the sides. There is an outline of a long lost cover like a dog-ear p-90. The logo is painted GIBSON but the finish is so bumpy and messed up it looks like it is not original. The back of the neck has been carved down and is very bumpy. I am just trying to figure out a game plan. If this is the real deal than I need to know before I start any work. I think with a lot of work I can make this into a real player. The owner defiantly wants the work done, but I wanted to get some more opinions and proceed cautiously. Thanks alot for any help.

Looks like an old es-125 gibson archtop to me.Do you have any pics. of the back? Any numbers on the back of the headstock? The newer ones have a number stamped on the interior.Someone might have sprayed over the old finish that didn't get along with it and is having a hard time drying, that could be why it's sticky.

I thought about the 125 but the pickguard and position of the pick up aren't right from all of the 125's I have seen. I think the sticky finish is thick shellac that never dried and I can't find any markings, I might have to remove some of the caked up finish on the headstock to find something to ID this thing.

Looks to me like a late-30's / early 40's L-30 with a Kay? pickup added some time in the 50's. Obviously it's had it's share of work, including the electronics, custom pickguard, and the creative pattern stripping I can't make much sense of. I'd say there is original finish left on it - just not much. Around the perimeter of the face is right, and there might be something below the surface on the headstock but it's definitely been painted over though - a lot of cheap old varnishes can crackle and get rather gummy over time like that. And the sound-post is a later addition as well.

It's certainly a Gibson though, and stripping the headstock isn't going to yield any useful information. An ink stamp FON on the back or neck block could be nice, but they can often fade on instruments from that period. The Important info is all in the dimensions and ornamentation. Length, width, binding, hardware, etc. Probably an L-30, maybe an L-37, could be a few other possibilities that aren't coming to mind right now.

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Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

I would probably vote for an ES-120T but I've only seen two, one of which had a black covered P-90 in the same position. The local store had one a few years ago that had been modified to include a single coil in the neck position.

While I'm a fan of old Gibsons I'm surprised every year or so at some previously unknown (to me) model that pops up. Sometimes I think these folks came to work every day and decided on the spur of the moment what they wanted to build.


Jay

Looks like an L-30, except the F holes appear to have been enlarged. Would be late 30's to early 40's. The original headstock logo would have been silkscreened in white. It's been repainted on this guitar. But the F-holes bother me, and the tailpiece isn't right--the string mounting bar on this is too wide and has a pattern in the casting that would not have been there on a Gibson. The headstock shape is right; the tuner buttons look too rectangular. I wonder if there was a Kay model with the same shape that could have been reworked like this.

Most definitely not in the ES series.

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Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.