Question - how do some guitar models stay cleaner than others?

[Despot]

This is something that I've thought about for a long time and it's been in my head again since the weekend.

Over the years I've had probably the guts of about 50 vintage guitars pass through my hands - Fenders, Gibsons, a few Gretsch, a few Guilds, even an old Rickenbacker.

I've always noticed that Fenders and Gibsons appear to wear differently - and I'm sure that's down to the lacquer. Fender necks wear smooth and always seems to leave a base waxy layer at the lowest wear point, whereas Gibson necks often wear in a way that looks like chips of finish have worn off in clumps, leaving these sort of fractal edged wear marks between the wood and finish.

But what I'm wondering is how different models age differently. I noticed that, by and large, the ads I've seen showing old ES models for sale usually show guitars that have markedly little wear when compared to a Les Paul or SG of equivalent vintage. You might get some lacquer checking or wear on the back of the neck - but mostly they seem to have survived without buckle rash or arm/rollover wear the way you usually see it on Les Pauls and SGs.

I'm guessing that this is down to the type of music back in the day - if LPs were being used during the '60s/'70s and beyond as 'rawk' guitars, ES guitars might have been more likely to have spent their lives in a jazz quartet or some other more sedate playing life.

That being said both of the vintage ES guitars that I have right now have buckle rash and extremely pronounced arm wear on the top - so I guess it's not every guitar.

Given that ES guitars were used for rock and roll in the '50s and '60s long before Les Pauls became fashionable, I still find it surprising that so many of them are pristine compared to LPs.

Anyway ... just my random Monday musings.

[simonhpieman]

All I can add to that is that my right arm wore through the edge of my Les Paul Studio within 3 or 4 years, although I played that thing to death in my teens. Hours every day.

The neck is wearing very oddly. I'm not sure if the neck didn't react with my pal's sweaty hands the other day too as next time I got it out of the case it was covered in a strange kind of... like you say, a bit like wax. Kinda sticky.

[sookwinder]

Kevin ... it is well past 2AM here in Oz, so I can't write a lot now.. I need zzzzzzzzzzz...
but ....
One factor maybe that those who are playing an ES model understand that if you drop it, or bash it against a chair or speaker box, it isn't going to be pretty. Where as , as the cover of the Clash's "London Calling" shows quite vividly, if you smash a Fender into the ground etc. it still keeps on working.

I will think further on the subject...

[rumfoord]

Great point. This makes me think that there are actually two factors to that idea:
1) people being more careful with a guitar that's fragile, but also
2) these ES guitars (and such) that get the heavier damage get pulled out of rotation at a higher rate because they've broken (as compared to Fenders and SGs).

I wonder too if this might be a measurement of these guitars just not being played as much in general. Like, individual models and people would vary widely, but overall there might be less 335s that are people's only or main guitar. Maybe this adds up to just a little more case-time that ends up presenting as a little less play wear over the course of decades.

[Despot]

Good points about the fragility of ES guitars versus Fenders.

I've often wondered how mine managed to not have a headstock or neck break as it's clearly been played to death since 1962!

[Mad-Mike]

I think it's a mix....

For example, when we talk acoustics and hollowbodies, they tend to more often than not be found in very nice condition used because they are more delicate than a solidbody electric guitar is.

Cost and Price Point are a big part of it too. Ever noticed how most pawn shops have a "#2 Stringball" hanging around or more like 4-5 - a #2 stringball being those cheap, import guitars that show up missing knobs, switches, jacks, have rust, dents, dings, stickers, bad action, poor setup, and usually go for less than $100 because the place can't get rid of them because they are either unusable to so terrible to play nobody wants to even try. Those guitars look bad because they were usuall owned by some crazy teenager whom wanted to make it "their own" looks wise, but had not the foggiest idea what they were doing. So they strung it up with .012s without adjusting the truss rod or action, broke switches and pots and left them that way, stuck on stickers once it started to look junky, and probably threw it around a time or two out of frustration.

Most of the bastardized offsets came from a time when Bastardized Offsets were "cool" - I'm talking the early 1990's, when you bought a Jaguar and slapped in a pair of humbuckers to be like Kurt Cobain, or bought a Jazzmaster, slapped on a Tune-O-Matic and a humbucker in the wide-open pickup cavity to be just like Lee Ranaldo or Thurston Moore. What's funny is so many of those look nice now because after the Grunge Novelty wore off of them - guitar rebuilders bought them up, repainted them, filled in the cavities, matched up parts, and now there's a large number I bet of Jaguars, JAzzmasters, Mustangs, and the like, roaming around the vintage market with filled in cavities for hums and replaced hardware, and nobody is the wiser because the person who rebuilt it did a painstaking job of reproducing what hte guitar was originally to get more money for it. When those guitars were still somewhat original - they were dragged around without a case, to dirty dive bars, and played aggressively covered in blood, sweat, maybe even tears, and never cleaned, they looked beat to hell.

Gibsons tend to stay cleaner because they both cost more, and because they tend to be sought after by genres whom tend to baby their guitars more or treat them more nicely. 90's guys beat the hell out of their guitars, 80's guys babied their Kramers but played them hard, and the 70's on back was before the whole modding/guitar-as-consumer-object thing was popular. Back then, according to my grandpa, many older musicians I've known and met playing gigs and recording, and so on - guitars, instruments in general, were looked at as being like a friend or a lover. You would not bash your wife's head against the stage now would you? Or let her get soaked in beer and vomit from bastard bar patrons now? So why would you do that to your guitar? It was a different time, I tend to find guitars that belong to people of that age or older tend to be in MUCH nicer shape, or if they are beat up, it's because their sweaty elbow has been eating away at the finish for 50 years but the guitar looks nice. This goes for almost anything owned prior to 1980 from my experience that is not a Teisco, Harmony, Kay, Eko, or some other "also ran" brand from Japan or somewhere else in Asia.

[Despot]

That's a good post Mad-Mike.

My own ES345 is gloriously worn - it was bought brand new and sparkling in Waltons in Dublin back in early 1963 (for the princely sum of £200 - which was a LOT of money back in the day) by a jobbing musician. And he played it - pretty much every night of the week - for years. He sold it to the store that sold it to me when he stopped playing guitar (I believe arthritis in his fingers meant that he couldn't play anymore).

That guitar is worn to hell - the neck finish is gone, the back is worn and the top has a lot of wear on it. The edge binding where the arm met the body is completely worn down, almost contoured now, and the wood is showing through the paint on the top. I've no doubt that he took care of his guitar (the fact that it never suffered a headstock break despite all the wear from play says as much), but he played it too. Given how much he paid for it the guitar had to have been a prized possession for him - 200 pounds in 1963 was a hell of a lot of money for anyone in Ireland, and it took him several years to pay it off.

[sookwinder]

As we have mentioned and discussed previously, there is also the type of / quality of the lacquer used by Gibson and fender. I am going to ignore the period when poly was introduced (but even then I have seen whole sheets of poly get peeled off the back of a mid 70s Jazz bass, yet my two Jazz basses, 73 and 75, would need a blow torch and a sharp weapon of mass destruction to remove the polyurethane from the body).

I tend to see Gibsons in the 66 - 68 period where whole sections of paint just cracks and falls away like a mud flat drying out. I personally do not have any guitars with that lacquer issue as I have kept away from them... although the 66/67 Texan that I won in that REVERB competition has evidence of this issue. It is not all Gibsons from that period either. Some, like my 68 B25 or my 67 335 or my 67 Epiphone Riviera have perfect paint finishes.

Now that I think about it I have seen it more on the Gibsons than the Epiphones, even though they were manufactured in the same factory. Does anyone have any knowledge as to whether there were two paint shops in the Kalamazoo plant/ Or did they use the same paint shop for both Epi and Gibby guitars ?

There is certainly evidence that either the quality of the lacquer used or some issue like contamination in the painting process, caused some of the Gibson colours to fade badly (as in the mid to late 60s Cherry bursts on their thinlines and their acoustics). Prior to about 65/66 you do not see this as much. Maybe the failure of the lacquer was a preparation thing, less time cleaning the raw body... I don't think Gibson used the Fullerplast that Fender used , as it has a colouring and a density that would be obvious in the acoustics at the very least... what else did they use to fill the poress surface of their guitars?

I suspect also that the type of lacquer catalyst used in the Fender necks (I do not know about the bodies) produced a softer finish than that used by Gibson. As we all have seen 50s and 60s Fender necks can be worn down smoothly , transitioning from the painted section to the worn away section without any "speed bumps" or edges. Yet on Gibsons (and Epis) I see this less ... even when a "penny size" hunk of finish gets knocked off a Gibson neck finish, it stays like it is for a long long time, where as a fender neck seemed to wear down to a smooth transition a lot quicker.

But of course there are always exceptions.

The checking on Fender bodies appears to be random.. in the sense that there are usually no long continuous lines of checking and if there are they are few in number. On the other hand ....[just spent 10 minutes looking at the finishes on my guitars] .... on Gibsons in the 60s (I don't have much experience of 50s Gibbys other than my 58 J200 and its finish is perfect) the checking lines are not really checking but more like just straight failure point lines in the finish like the way an earthquake causes fissures in a road surface. Once these long lines occur then perpendicular lines are start to occura nd small sections of the finsh start to come away from the body and neck.

I have shown this before, but these are a good example of what I am talking about (never seen this on a Fender) This is also why when I look for a mid to late 60s Gibson or Epiphone I always ask for photos that are close up that will show these lines (as I never see the vintage guitars I buy in the flesh)


I also noted on my 66 Texan this checking where the lines almost follow the grain of the wood... yeah they're not perfectly aligned, but you see very few sideways lines. Also the photo below of the Texan headstock shows quite common paint checking/flaking on the back of the headstock ... this time horizontally... but I suspect this is because in this situation there are high stress points in the lacquer around the tuners (tuner holes) and crack form to relieve stress ... basic physics

[Despot]

On the plus side D, those checking marks are usually my first indication that an old guitar is what it's supposed to be. The long parallel Gibson checking lines - that'll be a mid-late '60s Gibson. The 'crazy paving' checking - that'll be a Fender or sometimes an early '60s Gibson. Ditto finish that has entirely sunk into the wood and appears matte but with no checking at all.

Like you I suspect that certain years meant changes to lacquer or colour coat, and that these were the primary cause of how certain years check in certain ways, but not others. That horizontal checking at the back of the headstock that you've shown ... I've seen that a hell of a lot on '64 and '65 guitars ... less so on other years. The long body checking - again, mostly post '65 ... and from personal experience you get it more as you go later in the decade, and a lot of it in the '70s.

Fender v Gibson necks - I think you're right on the nitro additive used. Fender finishes, in general, feel less heavy than Gibson. Gibson finishes from the mid-late 60s onwards seem, to me, to get heavier and thicker. The earlier finishes seem lighter. Again though ... it varies. I've seen quite light finishes on ES guitars (to the extent that it fully sinks into the body wood) and rather thick/heavy finishes on other guitars - usually Juniors. I think the reason for this with LP Juniors is the fact that the sunburst finishes are not translucent (i.e. you don't see the grain) - and it's usually sunburst Juniors that I've seen with heavier finishes.

I just find this stuff fascinating - glad to hear from anyone who knows any of the technical reasons behind these things (or whether there were different paint shops, as Sookwinder suggests).

[Shadoweclipse13]

I think everybody is right so far (lacquer types, possibly type of music that was played as well), but there are a few things I think about that could be a factor as well. An ES compared to an LP or Tele could be different because being a larger body, it might physically sit different on a person.

I could see people babying an ES a little more being that they know a hollow or semi-hollow bodied guitar is more fragile too.

Despot, I think you touched on something interesting when you mentioned that ES types were the "rock" guitar in the 50's before LP's were, but my thought was that people were probably more "proper" in the 50's and might be worn long sleeve shirts or a suit when playing. I've never seen Chuck Berry duck-walking in shorts and a t-shirt. So, besides being a physical barrier (soft clothes), it could also be affecting the lacquer differently, i.e. no sweat on the body (like a catalyst).

Just thinking out loud here...

[Despot]

That's a good point actually - about the clothing worn.

Another thing that I find funny is how much our opinions are shaped through looking back on the '60s and '70s knowing what we know now. I've seen B.B. King playing many guitars - and through the late '60s and '70s it's clear that he kept updating his stage guitars - there's a shift from an early ES355 with a bigsby to one with a Vibrola unit (so later '60s) and then one that's in walnut (so '70s). Whereas now we all look at those early ES guitars as the top of the line with standards dropping as time went by, clearly every so often Gibson were coming to him with their 'new improved' model, which he adopted and used at the time.