Tuck Andress’ 1953 Gibson L5 at Gryphon in Palo Alto, CA

 

From Gryphon workshop:

FIX IT FRIDAY: repairing Tuck Andress' 1953 Gibson L-5!

We first met Tuck Andress and his 1953 Gibson L-5 in the mid-1980s, back when he and his wife Patti Cathcart were still performing in the courtyard of the New Varsity Theater in downtown Palo Alto. Over the decades Tuck has toured and recorded extensively with this guitar and it has had more than its fair share of hard knocks. During its last check-up, it didn’t need any major work, but we did grab a few photos of the kinds of things that can happen to a guitar that has lived most of its life on the road. 

In the first photo, when Tuck needed to raise the action at the nut before a concert, and he didn’t have time to find a luthier, he shimmed the nut using the cardboard from a string package. In the second photo, you can see the L-5 has been refretted so many times the inlay at the third fret has been sanded down to about two thirds of its original size. The third photo shows two cracks in the top caused by a falling microphone stand. We made a new nut and repaired the cracks. We also refretted the guitar but Tuck is used to the way the worn inlay looks and feels, so we leveled the fretboard but left the inlay as is.