FEATURE
FAN TRIBUTE TRANSFORMATION Billy Stapleton
Sometimes a guitarist wants his own guitar online and enlarged it to actual size to get to be a tribute to one of his guitar heroes, so the proper dimensions of the pickguard and a transformation needs to take place. That is decorative plates. Early in the project I replaced One of the more challenging repairs was to fill
exactly what happened when Stan Mapolski the dot inlays with a set of Les Paul inlays I had. in the crudely routed space between the two
took his Gibson SG to his luthier friend Billy
Gibson stock and would bevel wonderfully.
pickups (see pic. #3). I had a nice piece of
Stapleton. Stan’s hero in this case was John Here’s all the different paper shapes (pic. #2) Honduras mahogany to inlay over the old route.
Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service. cut out of the enlargement and glued to 1/4" The grain matched up extremely well. Master
pattern plywood to make templates. I think Luthier Paul Stroh was an endless source of
Thanks to Billy for the photographs and I used every tool in my shop to shape the knowledge for this project. He supplied the
comments on this tribute make over! patterns. Using my favorite old scratch awl, I Gibson filler and the final cherry nitro. The pic
traced the patterns onto a Stewart MacDonald shows the filler and my razor knife imitation of
This is what Stan and I started with (see pic. 5 ply pickguard sheet. The material they were the original lacquer checking.
#1). I found a shot of John Cipollina’s guitar using at the time was very close to old 60’s
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Mar Apr 2017
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