Once there was a man who cursed me because I did these restorations to old
guitars. He even spoke badly of me for doing it.
He Downright Flamed Me !!!
(He felt that certain things should never be changed).
Until one day his girlfriend stepped on the cable of his original 1958
Flying Vee. She stepped on the cable directly in front of the guitar. The cable
snapped up causing the input jack to literally explode out of the guitar. It
totally destroyed the lower bout in the weak spot where the jack had originally
been drilled. The end result was a splintered nasty mess where the chunk
of wood extracted itself from the face of his very valuable guitar.
Then this same man (Who has paid me well for his anonymity) was
knocking on my door to repair his $75,000.00 guitar.
(Update 2005 $125,000.00 guitar)
I guess when the shoe was on the other foot, he didn't seem to mind that
I could fix his guitar so that not even he could tell it was repaired.
When I took the job in I told him that I could definitely fix it, I also
told him that I would not tell him how I fixed it. I also told him if he could
see the repair I would not charge him for the job.
Believe me he tried to find the repair. When he
arrived to retrieve his guitar he came with a magnifying glass and a halogen
light. He spent 15 minutes looking for the spot where he assumed we had glued in
the wood and made the repair.
It took him several years to sell the guitar. In effect someone with a
1958 Flying V is floating around out there thinking that his guitar is original.
Here's how I repaired it. (12 years has passed at the time of
this writing) If he happens to read this, then he will finally know how I
fixed it.
I split the guitar completely in two and used a whole new piece of wood on
the bottom bout of the V. I simply replaced it with a new piece of korina and
then refinished the entire guitar. That was the easy part. We didn't know
as much about distressing
guitars as we do today. We were using ultraviolet lamps to age the nitro,
spraying Freon, freezing & baking guitars to get them to check.
It wasn't that hard to do because the guitar was really clean to start
with and it was just an aged clear that we had to make look old. It's much
harder with colors like sunburst. White korina doesn't have a distinctive grain
pattern that is either memorable or discernable by too many people.
Remember there is only one sure way to buy a vintage guitar and be sure
that it is original.
If you buy it at a garage sale or find it in an old attic somewhere and
pick it up for 100.00. You can rest assured your guitar is original. The
minute the guitar is tainted with a huge price you can be pretty close to
positive that something has been changed in it.
Dealers who specialize in vintage guitars don't like me to talk about this
type of thing. In my case vintage guitars are only one small part of the entire
market. So I simply don't care.
Ed Roman 10/23/07
Inlay Work
First rough draft of the Dragon Inlay
I am redoing the blue wings with turquoise.
Of course, now that I have decided to do a Dragon Inlay on the guitar, it
would be relatively easy for someone to tell that the guitar is not original. I
really don't care about originality. I fully expect this guitar to play &
sound better than most PRS guitars so I will probably be keeping it for myself.
(This Job was done prior to me building
Quicksilver Guitars)
Finished version ready for frets
above
Ready for finishing
I made a huge mistake
when I did this inlay.
I used the original PRS fingerboard..
I should have replaced it with a jet black gaboon
ebony fingerboard.
The dragon inlay would have looked much better on black than on brown !!!
The guitar would have played & sounded even better !!!
The extra $100 I saved would have made this guitar $2,500.00 more
valuable!!!
Oh well, I won't make that mistake again!!!!!
The Poor Man's Dragon
Finished and Ready to Rock
Ok, so this guitar isn't built by a group of low paid factory
workers, Ok, so the inlay isn't done on a CNC machine. Ok, this guitar isn't
technically "Original".
I guarantee this guitar will play circles
around a stock PRS Dragon, I guarantee the neck to be faster, the frets
smoother & tighter, I guarantee the pickups to sound better, the overall
tone of the guitar to be far more versatile than a stock PRS. I guarantee the
top to be as beautiful as any PRS private stock guitar and the workmanship is
unparalleled in the industry.
I am not producing these guitars, I don't have the time, I
built this one for myself as an experiment to see what it would cost.
Oh Yeah, the other reason I built it was because I wanted a
24 fret guitar, PRS doesn't do 24 fret Dragons.
I knew there was a better reason than the first one. I might even have kept
this guitar, except for my dumbass blunder with the
rosewood vs ebony fingerboard.
Ed Roman
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