6118 gets a David Lee face lift

this is sort of a crosspost but I'm proud of how a mod to a new anniv I did
turned out. fully gutted and upgraded to tvjones p'tron classic & cls +,sperz, alum saddled
Abr-1 drilled, and tone pot instead of tone switch. take a look.

Ooooh, nice job TV - I like that very much!


Kid.

Your a Brave guy TV, i would never have the guts to take a drill to my precious Gretsch. Nice job though.

thanks guys, this is the umpteenth time I've done the usual mods to the nashvilles but the twist was making those dang p90 covers fit in Certainly not a retro fit thing but we ran it through the bassman
tonight and there is a big differerence in the clean tones with the lack of brass and nickel surrounding
the bobbins. Very jangly with heightened string dynamics compared to the classics in the SSU and
pwrtrons in the specta.

Nice guitar TV, but are changing the tuners a difficult thing to do? I want to change the tuners on mine as well as put good strap locks on but I am a little worried about messing it up. I know of a wicked guitar tech in my area that would do the work but if it is not too difficult I would rather do it myself. I am a hands-on kind of guy and would feel a lot more pride doing it myself....

Pompado'er wrote:

Nice guitar TV, but are changing the tuners a difficult thing to do? I want to change the tuners on mine as well as put good strap locks on but I am a little worried about messing it up. I know of a wicked guitar tech in my area that would do the work but if it is not too difficult I would rather do it myself. I am a hands-on kind of guy and would feel a lot more pride doing it myself....

In recent gretsch guitars that have the vintage open gear "stay tights", you can remove them fairly easy and use a precision steel peghole reamers to open the peghole enough to accept the large diameter of sperzels base. I would also highly encourage the use of a micrometer throughout the process so that
you dont end up overreaming the peghole, and then making the mistake of over tightening the sperzel's
nut over the tuning post and compressing the laminate thus causing the surface to crack.

Whether you go precision or just manually use a hand tapered reamer, use the reamer. In dire straits
you can try varying sizes of REVERSE rake drill bits but the risk of cracking the headstock is NOT EVER
worth it.

in anycase when the pegholes are opene proper, you will then need to drill a tiny cleat hole adjacent the posthole as sperzels use a small but pronounce cleat to seat the machine static and keep any lateral movement at bay. This is another caution job and you should use a stop marker on the bit
to avoid going through the entire headstock which is SUPER easy to screw up and do because of the
small diameter of drill bit.

Finally you will have to fill the existing "stay tight" screw holes with mini dowels to complete the job.

its much work BUT TOTALLY worth it IMO, the only gretch that was ever a perfect retrofit for the locking sperzels was the Spectrasonic that comes OEM with non locking sperzels. Dump those off the guitar and drop in the locking ones. 10 minutes! unlike the 2 long job of swapping vintage tuners for modern lockers.

Is this the new Gibson "robot" guitar?

Thanks for the info TV, but it sounds like a job for the tech. I am handy but not willing to risk messing up my guitar with a first time attempt.

I'm just waitin' for the Robot Guitarist! Bam!

Where do these stairs go?-Ray
They go up!-Peter

she's gone to her first owner, all dolled up of course. On to the next one! Maybe a duojet
with 3 tele bridge pkups!! Suhr V60s!!

How much did it go for?

ArtVandelay wrote:

How much did it go for?

Tv&theFLATblackthrill wrote:

ArtVandelay wrote:

How much did it go for?

Ha