This goldtop Les Paul by Vintage was brought in for a setup and wiring upgrade, it also was suffering from bad tuning instability. Upon inspection it turned out that the previous owner had changed the hardware and bodged the fitting of the new parts, the bridge and tail piece posts were loose and being pulled out of the body, this was the cause of the tuning problems, so would need to be sorted before the rest of the work could be done. The first job was removing the old posts before dealing with correctly reinstalling the hardware. |
Photo showing the paper/card that had been used to pack out the bridge and tailpiece holes, this was the reason why the guitar wasn't staying in tune, as the tension of the strings was compressing the paper and wasn't providing a strong anchor point. The holes were plugged with mahogany before the post inserts were refitted, much stronger than paper! |
Now with the post anchors correctly installed, the tuning instability disappeared!
The guitar was then treated to a full setup and new strings before it was ready for the customer to collect!