After 2 and a half years away, I thought some of the people who followed this conversation might be interested in an update. To refresh, I posted a photo of my F-412 which had what I was told by the previous owner was a factory-applied rosewood pick guard. It was established that the pick guard was NOT applied at the factory. Here is that guard.
I ended up, after lengthy talks with Nate and his crew, taking the F-412 down to Third Coast Guitar Repair in Chicago. It needed a neck reset, which was no surprise for a 48 year-old guitar. Beyond that, there were numerous small cracks in the spruce top. Beyond that, they said they would take up the rosewood guard and let me know what was under there. All future decisions would flow from that information. The good news was that the original Guild rosette was in pretty good shape, aside from numerous additional cracks around the sound hole under the old guard. We decided the rosewood guard was most likely applied to cover those cracks. between all the cracks, a slightly lifting bridge, the damage from the rosewood pick guard removal and the repair needed to hide the damage from the "shooting star" patch that had been applied to cover the holes where the original pots were located, I made the call to have the entire top re-finished. Even with the re-finish, though, the damage under the (oversized) bridge was too significant to be able to go back to an original-size bridge. Also, I never did find the original factory-installed pickup that had been removed. Since an actual restoration was out of the question, I elected to make aesthetic changes that would make the guitar more beautiful -- at least to my personal taste. The first of those changes were to switch from a rosewood bridge to an ebony one and to go with a black pick guard. With the ebony fingerboard, I've always thought black bridges and guards were really classy. I also found and sent Third Coast ebony pot dials.
The last decision was what to do about the area immediately below the finger board where the original pickup was mounted. I learned that Guild pickups from the 1960's were often Hagstom units. I contacted them and inquired what they knew about Guild pickups from that time. They replied that no one there knew much about that, but that in the warehouse they had found a "very old-looking" pickup, one that looked almost identical to the photo I had sent them. I bought it. In keeping with the all-ebony theme, I asked Third Coast to replace the rosewood face plate on that pickup with an ebony one. The only visual difference I could see between the new pickup from Hagstom and the photos I have of the original pickup is that the original had lines (metal inserts, as I recall) running through the face plate. The final touch I requested, then, was to take that new ebony face plate for the pickup and put 2 MOP lines in place (MOP because of the MOP inserts on the finger board) to replicate the lines on that original pickup.
The work took nearly 9 months in total, but the result, in my opinion, is elegant and beautiful. And the guitar is unbelievably playable. It was a long time coming and not exactly inexpensive, but it was one of the most worthwhile checks I wrote in 2017. Here is the result:
I want to close with a special thanks top the guys at Third Coast. They were as excited about the project as I was and were willing collaborators in all major decisions. And they were great to humor request like changing the pickup face plate and putting MOP lines on it.
If anyone has questions about any decisions I left out, let me know.