1966 FIREGLO 4005 RECONDITIONING PROJECT

This one came to us before we moved to Modena, Italy. It was supposed to have been a signed for delivery, but the UPS driver in California marked his delivery record as “signed for”, and dropped it over the fence into our side yard!

After a couple of hours of back and forth and some unsxigned for stress, we finally located it.

The reconditioning was accomplished in our new workshop. The request was to not restore it to “as new”, but to re-set the neck, clean it up, rebind and re-fret it, redo the sound hole binding, install a new Dane Wilder wiring harness, and touch up the finish to match the old, bleached, and worn original finish. In order to reset the neck, the back had to come off, and it was in bad shape anyway, so we made a new one out of book matched maple, and re-bound it using the original checkerboard and white binding “sandwich”, which we carefully removed from the original back. The new back was refinished to match the old one.

It was intended to look as though it had been in constant use since 1966! This meant no glassy, shiny new clearcoat, and as little new hardware as possible. In fact, the only new hardware was a new Winfield 4005 bridge.

There were eight different colors and tints mixed in order to replicate the colors and condition of the original finish in areas where the new finish was to be blended into the old one. This was about 110% of the time and labor required for a full refinish to “as new” condition, as we typically are doing for customers.

The satisfying results are seen below: