1965 Gibson EB2 bass extensive repair and restoration

Apraisal upon arrival

Once on the bench we carried out some more checks and in addition to the obvious faults we found that the truss rod wasn't working. On the plus side though, the baritione choke was still present under the bridge, the neck to body angle was good and there were no nasty neck or headstock breaks.

To do list:

remove all parts and remove fretboard, make and fit a new one.

Free up truss rod or remove and replace,

make and fit new headstock overlay

source a 60's pickup and rewire with new pots, jack, B switch

remove binding and replace with new binding

prep and repair bodywork/veneer damage

refinish in nitro cellulose

truss rod channel repairs, new truss rod and rebinding

With the fretboard removed, we found a common problem of the truss rod rusted into the neck and the end of the channel was badly crushed from the truss rod anchor. This was repaired with a routed in new piece of dense mahogany. We made and fitted an new truss rod and refitted its cover strip.

The binding was removed, the channel cleaned up and new binding fitted. The damaged veneer wwas brought flush to the new binding.

New fretboard and headstock overlay.

We made a new fretboard, added the dot markers and medium jumbo frets.

We made a new headstock overlay from 3mm quarersawn maple as the headstock had be previously thinned by 3mm for reasons unknown. The sides of the headstock were repaired and made flush with veneer strips.

Paintwork, reassembly and set up

A genuine '60's pickup was sourced from Reverb and once we'd done a small repair to the choke we rewired it to the new components. We modified a foot switch for use as the baritone switch.

Prepped and masked, ready for paintwork, the customer chose 'as new' gleaming Pelham blue.

Once dry, buffed and polished it was reassembled and set up on 40 -100 roundwound strings.