Luthier Notes:

Story of “Pinky” the Guitar

Sometimes a guitar just finds you…and sometimes you find the guitar.  A young man gave me a call and had a few guitars he wanted us to look at.  He had an American Strat and 2 Gibson SG’s he had just picked up on Ebay.  We set up an appointment and he brought over his 3 ladies.  He needed some work on the Strat…some new pickups and a custom wiring harness.  The first SG was a 2003 faded cherry made in Nashville.  A very nice guitar that played like shit but had very cool crescent moon inlays.  Finally he pulled out what has since become known as “Pinky”, an 80’s SG with a HSS setup…what that means is that is has a humbucker in the bridge position and 2 single coils.  Now we were flabbergasted…never had we seen this kind of a setup on an SG and we have had some weird SG’s in the shop lately, like the 1991 Custom Deluxe reissue of the 1961 with 3 humbuckers (see pic.) and in the TV yellow.  Now if that was the only quirk it would have been one thing, but it also had a Kahler bridge on it too that looked to be stock!  We were all over this guitar, and proceed to grill the new owner extracting any info he knew about this coral pink freak of a guitar.  All he knew was that it was an 80’s Gibson. 
We spend the next 4 hours test-driving some pickups so he can fine-tune the tone he was looking for, and then worked out an estimate over the next 2 days that was to his liking.  We decide to take possession of the faded SG as trade-in and upgrade the strat and the pink SG.  Over the next 2 weeks we posted messages about “Pinky” and her unique setup…and we waited…and waited.  More than a week and half pass by before we finally got our answer.  “Pinky” was a guitar that was a custom order only, made in 1986-1987, only 400 were made and the Kahler bridge came stock.  A great guitar and it turns out to be pretty rare. Now we had “Pinky” for a couple of weeks and ordered parts for her and her sister…but things changed.  I called up the owner and he was tickled…well pink!  He purchased a very rare guitar at a great price and decided to put a little more love into her, and to be honest she needed it.  The frets were very worn, the nut was 20 years old, and the tuners were outdated.  We already had an idea for the pickups but decided to go all out when we found out what we were working on.  We decided to go with Seymour Duncan pickups…the 59’s to be more specific.  Now, you remember the 1991 reissue I mentioned before?  Well that has 3 humbuckers, and that gave us an idea.  We could use the lil 59’s for the single coils and that would give “Pinky” an alternate setup that is still custom, but inspired by the 1961/1991.  Sperzel trim lock tuner, new frets, new bone nut, and custom wiring harness round out the bill…stay tuned to see how she turns out and more about the work we do here at Lazarus Guitars.

 

To Be Continued…