Guitar and Stringed Instrument Services
Complete Refretting ServicesGuitars, Mandolins, and any stringed instruments. Services include Refretting, Crown & Polish, or single fret replacement.
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Body & Finish WorkBroken Headstocks, Chip, Cracks, Neck Resets, Fingerboard Replacement, Custom Nuts, Custom Bridges, Belly Reduction
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Complete RestorationBring me your tired, sick, and broken guitars and I will make them new again!
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Useful News & Information!
Guitar Repairs You Shouldn't Attempt Yourself
By Mark Phillips and Jon Chappell from Guitar For Dummies, 2nd Edition 7 of 10 in Series: The Essentials of Maintaining a Bass GuitarAt some point, every instrument, including the guitar, requires some kind of repair. Although you can fix a wide variety of guitar problems yourself, some repairs alwaysrequire a qualified repairperson to fix (assuming that anyone can repair them at all). The most common of these are
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Ibanez "Lawsuit" Guitars
Having started as a relatively unknown and low-budget Japanese guitar brand, Ibanez discovered the way to success around 1970 when they started making copies of well-known American guitars like Gibson, Fender and Rickenbacker. They did a good job: the guitars were good copies, at least from a visual point of view. Non-Free Traders take note: they were able to make these guitars affordable due to cheaper materials and labor, coupled with a higher level of automation when compared to their American counterparts. Mr. Rosenbloom figured it out early: make a guitar that “looks” great and similar to a “big name” guitar and people will buy it. This is precisely the phenomenon we see with today’s Epiphones. Before we get too sentimental we must remember that when you inspect some of the earlier guitars that the construction was not completely accurate and faithful to the originals. Most of the Les Paul copies had bolt-on necks and multi-piece, plywood tops. Routings for electronics and wiring were pretty rough in a manner similar to today’s Indonesian guitars. But Ibanez got very popular because young guitarists that could not afford a Gibson or a Fender could buy a guitar that offered a good balance between price and quality...and looked professional! On June 28, 1977, Norlin, the parent company of Gibson, filed a lawsuit against Elger (Ibanez) in Philadelphia Federal District Court . The case was "Gibson Vs. Elger Co." with Gibson claiming trademark infringement based on the duplicate "open book" or "moustache" headstock design of the Ibanez copies. Allegedly Gibson had threatened to sue Elger/Ibanez for a long time regarding the use of the headstock which Norlin claimed as a Gibson trademark. Ironically, by the fall of 1976 Ibanez had redesigned their headstocks to look much like those found Guild guitars. The new headstock design even appeared in the 1976 catalog! So, conspiracy theorists, by the time the lawsuit was actually filed, the headstocks had already been changed. While "lawsuit" head generally means a Gibson copy headstock, the Ibanez headstock at the time of the lawsuit was actually a copy of a Guild headstock. It is an urban legend that the Gibson/Norlin lawsuit was filed against a number of Japanese companies. It is also commonly held it was over the exact copying of American designs. Neither of these urban legends are true. |