House of Rock

14 Nov A 1959 Gibson Les Paul Conversion & a David Allen P51

Another long time project that I have was to “fix” an old original, 1952 style Gibson Les Paul – originally started as a Gold Top in the early 1950s – that I had bought in Florida probably 20 years ago.

It was my first 1950s Les Paul conversion, and the conversion itself had been done horribly. Never the less, I played the guitar for years live and at home. It was my main Les Paul for a long time, until the Lentz conversion came about years later.  I don’t have a picture of what the guitar looked like when I first got it. The guitar was refinished a number of times, eventually staying in gold with P90s (replicas) as its last condition before I decided to have it properly converted in 1959 style again – but this time, done as it should have been.

Finally Converted Properly.

It took almost two years to friend Luca of Cloe Guitars, but the guitar is now successfully converted. Luca did a number of incredible things to it. The first one – wasn’t easy for me – was to replace the neck. The neck was probably not its original one from the start – it had been reset for sure, but it had a very strange shape, definitely too thin, probably a 1970s neck anyways. Not only it didn’t have the proper angle in the 1950s Les Paul body, but it was shaped too strange for the guitar to get its full range of sound. So Luca swapped it with one that was carefully modelled after other conversions of mine. (more…)