bdeclee
Member
Thanks to Marc Ellis, I am now the very happy owner of this gorgeous blue F65-CE! As many of you undoubtedly know, Marc lives in Vietnam and I don't, so the scariest part of this transaction was the shipping from there to here. I had awful visions of the guitar sitting on a snowy (or boiling) tarmac somewhere in Outer Mongolia, or customs agents digging a giant divot in the fingerboard looking for white abalone. Thankfully, none of those nightmares came to pass. The guitar arrived in record time, sat in my dining room for about 5 hours while it decompressed, and when I opened the case I saw with relief that it had weathered the time and temperature zones flawlessly.
The guitar is in excellent condition, appearing to have had little wear and tear. The body & tuners needed cleaning, so my luthier husband and I took off the strings and the tuners, cleaned the tuners with naptha and some nubbly paper towels, and then Chris changed out the plastic bridge pins for bone ones with lovely blue paua eyes. (This required only a tiny bit of reaming out the bridge pin holes.)
With a new set of strings, she sounds awesome! My good Marshall amp is not here right now, so I can't test the electronics with anything but a dinky little practice amp, but they work well as far as I can tell.
Here are some photos (sorry, taken with iPhone) of the work in progress:
Tuners are off:
The body sans strings, pins or saddle:
The fingerboard after cleaning the frets & oiling:
Soundhole
Cleaned tuners back on:
Replacing the bridge pins:
Some lovely blue quilted maple (well, you know what I mean):
And a little more blue:
Many, many thanks again to Marc for selling me this beautiful instrument!
Happy New Year to all!
Barbara
The guitar is in excellent condition, appearing to have had little wear and tear. The body & tuners needed cleaning, so my luthier husband and I took off the strings and the tuners, cleaned the tuners with naptha and some nubbly paper towels, and then Chris changed out the plastic bridge pins for bone ones with lovely blue paua eyes. (This required only a tiny bit of reaming out the bridge pin holes.)
With a new set of strings, she sounds awesome! My good Marshall amp is not here right now, so I can't test the electronics with anything but a dinky little practice amp, but they work well as far as I can tell.
Here are some photos (sorry, taken with iPhone) of the work in progress:
Tuners are off:
The body sans strings, pins or saddle:
The fingerboard after cleaning the frets & oiling:
Soundhole
Cleaned tuners back on:
Replacing the bridge pins:
Some lovely blue quilted maple (well, you know what I mean):
And a little more blue:
Many, many thanks again to Marc for selling me this beautiful instrument!
Happy New Year to all!
Barbara
