Pawnshop Dan always brings me the most interesting guitars:  old brands nobody has heard of,  beat up, no name classical guitars with incredible old wood and fretboards, and this cool Kay guitar that he brought in last week.   Something about this guitar I really liked.  Yea, the neck was blocky and the pickup output a bit weak, but it just had that “something” from another era, and I could hear it when I played this guitar.  This guitar was cool.    It needed to have some grounding done on it to get the electronics to work properly, and thankfully there was this little back way into the guitar, something that EVERY hollowbody electric should have to make those repairs just a little easier. I’d never seen that before, but it made the job more managable and with less chance to mess something else up, which is always a possibility when pulling complete electronics out of hollowbody/semi-hollowbody guitars.  

Turns out on the original design of this guitar the pickup switch and bridge/strings were never grounded, so when the volume was turned down there was this horrible buzzing sound.  We got that fixed up, put on a new set up strings, set the intonation and Pawnshop Dan was on his way. 

Bill Hibbets, a great guitar player who also happens to run Inner Knot records, a distribution company for established musicians,  dropped this guitar off a few weeks ago and it was in need of some heavy guitar TLC.   Not only was alot of the hardware missing or just hagged out, someone had done an amateur broken headstock repair. 

I checked out and stabilized the headstock,  upgraded the bridge, saddle and tuners, gave the frets a leveling and polishing, full setup, and to top it off refinished the area of the neck where the headstock damage was visible.  

 Here is Bill in the shop testing the guitar out with a set of 10 guage strings.   This guitar has some miles on it, but its a definite player’s guitar;  just enough dings, heavy body, and lots of tone.

For more details and pictures on the headstock finish repair, check out the Galleries Section of our website.

Bill Hibbets Lays Down a Funky Groove