The 59 (well ish) SidRon Les Paul

One day Ron turned up at the shed clutching some bits - he'd been talking about this guitar for months and months. It was an uncompleted project started by Sid , a mate of one of his mates. Years ago Sid had found some lovely lovely book end matched mahogany and had set about building at 59 spec Les Paul - brilliantly bound, the body was finished and was immaculate, the neck was on so it was built but needed a fretboard hewing out of the ebony slab and frets and lots of complicated stuff

Major Project !!! This is going to be a long story

We laid it out on the bench in all of its glory, wow the workmanship was just stunning, the build was immaculate and built to an exact '59 spec

We turned it over - even the cover plates on the switch and the control back plate were grain matched

We looked at each other - I had a Laurel and Hardy moment and Ronnie had a Jaws moment, so we got into that bigger boat and rowed over to Seb's - our favorite grown up when we realise that we are totally out of our depth. I will admit here that we cheated. Rather than use the ebony slab, i found a bunch of guys in Germany who were making 59 completed fretboards with inlays so we whisked that off to Seb and got him to do the complicated stuff and to slim down the neck profile. A proper job.

And so to the headstock - look no holes said Ron, so we messed around searching the web, using the Book of the Burst and cutting out paper templates but it just didn't feel right, so in the end I found someone who had "New Old Stock" of genuine (ha!) Gibson headstock laminates which fitted like a dream such was Sid's work, and tempting as it was to stick it on we resisted and just used it as a template to locate the holes - bit of a spray up of the head and a set of Snot Green Klusons (Sid's insistence right from the get go) and that bit was done.

We were lucky for the bridge and stop bar, I had recently fitted a new nickel set to Jonny my Band Zebrs's lead guitarist's Les Paul and he kindly donated the old set to this project, so then on to the Electrics.

For the pickups Ron knew exactly what he wanted on it - Monty's pickup in Worcestershire - a Full Monty Humbucker set., lovingly wrapped and delivered cradled in straw. We dropped them in strung it up and wired them straight to the op jack - Jaw Dropping , awesome and other big and sometimes less polite words were used.

So now on to the electrics, 50's wiring, obvious but the original bursts had a rather special volume pot with a 65/35 ratio, meaning with the pot in the middle 65% of the resistance was one way and 35% in the other. You can get these, usually rusty broken and not working for a 5 figure sum - they haven't been made for 70 years, so the hunt was on.

Amassing a huge box of assorted pots, measuring them and listening to them we eventually found a pot we liked from Bare Knuckle pickups who had been researching this exact problem and commissioned a custom build run from CTS the original makers. Tone pot was a mojo tone with a slightly different law which seemed to fit the bill perfectly, then a nice clunky Switchcraft switch to finish off. Was hoping for Black Bee caps but they didnt arrive so it ended up with Orange drop caps in it.

And so it was done and is probably the closest to a Real one that I will ever lay hands on.