About three years ago I texted him this G&L F100 and somehow he bid and bought it. Here are some deep-before pics from the purchase auction:
I'll be spare with words, but on arrival it was seriously one of *the* best playing & sounding guitars I'd ever played. Only a newer Ernie Ball Petrucci I played once even comes close to the way this guitar just makes playing feel natural for me, to use the cliche, 'like an extension of your body.' Built solid as a rock as well.
Then again I did recognize several issues on first picking it up:
- Intonation was not adjustable within the proper range; the saddles wouldn't go sharp enough
- Action was also an issue, as it would not go high enough to avoid buzz; this with the micro-tilt set flat. As a matter of fact, it basically made the micro-tilt unusable
- The finish was nowhere near as nice as it appeared in pics; by which I mean there was no finish, which was unexpected. Bare mahogany with open grain, rather than what looked like a vintage 'tobacco' transparent finish
Order of business one was the saddles; on review they were G&L DFV (vibrato) saddles. Early F100 saddles were totally unique to the (F100-only) string-through "Lock-Tight" bridge. Thanks to the assistance of Gabe from Electric Stringed Instruments (they reproduce trem bars and back plates for G&Ls) I was able to source probably the last set of NOS F100 saddles ever produced.
See the difference below; F100 saddles on bass, DFV on treble. The DFV saddles are shorter, and... Shorter.
Gabe also helped source a ribbon from the original production log-book; as suspected from a bit of leftover finish, the guitar was black from the factory.
In all honesty the raw finish of the guitar made me nervous of warping; in SoCal heat I shower guitars in sweat about ten months out of the year, so it wasn't getting played anywhere near as much as it should have considering how great of a guitar it is.
I thought about just grain filling and adding clear/satin, the mahogany being not un-attractive; but since I had the enthusiasm, space, and time to do it- I figured might as well complete the project Dad and I discussed briefly, and return it to original black. Dad restored old cars, and his policy was to always paint things the original color when he could which is how we wound up with a coral and gray 55 Chevy among other things, so in his spirit I went to work:
^Inner workings of the F100-only string-through bridge
^No pic, but it's also stamped 'F100 - I'
^Scribbling/unreadable date stamp
Wiring mostly original but unoriginal/spliced by some percentage.
...After grain filling/sealer I paused. The original wood looked *really* good. But I went ahead & primered over that anyway:
^Pre-clear
...Here's where things went sideways for just a minute, for the drama. I read a lot online that there was no need to sand between clear coats, and that got me pretty close to nowhere as the finish was WAY too textured. My technique was crap. I also sprayed on a freak day with 80% humidity in SoCal, and the finish didn't like that:
So I sanded most of the clear off and started over again:
^Better!
Waited till the finish was good and hard before the final wet sand and polish. Also added some (now-reproduced) red/black rubber tips from G&L:
It also matches the other G&L I picked up for myself last year
Sounds amazing still, but I'm going to avoid playing it for a few months at least to avoid messing with the finish too much while it's curing; also because it looks so good I'm pretty much thinking I need to baby it from here on out anyway So there's my dad's guitar, mourning its master in black.