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Baldwin Baby Bison Restore


Songman68

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I am working on restoring my 1960's Baldwin Baby Bison. I will post some pics and steps on here as I go along.

The original color was Candy Apple red, I had stripped this guitar down to bare wood in high school and finished it natural, put a Bill Lawrence stacked humbucker in the bridge and a Duncan Distortion pickup in the neck. I was young and dumb when I did this OK confused.gif. So the neck pickup cavity was routed out for a humbucker and the bridge pickup cavity wasn't. So I had some fill in work to do on the neck pickup cavity. I filled in the gaps of the neck pickup cavity with pieces of wood I cut off a Home Depot Paint stirring stick, which worked great. Pics to come, my camera needs to be charged. I have decided not to go with the original color which would be a true restore but I hate that color, going with vintage cream which I got from reranch.com.

I wish I had kept the original pickups but I didn't, so I will be putting in two Brian May Burns Tri-Sonics I got off eBay new. Anyone need a single Brian May Burns pickup, got one pickup for sale for $44 plus shipping. Another issue I have is that I no longer have the original pickup rings, which sucks. Ever tried to buy pickup rings for Burns Tri-sonics, they don't exist, those are some huge single coil pickups. I ordered some black pickgaurd material from Guitar Fetish and I have to custom make the pickup rings with my router. More to come with pics later on. The attached pic is the before pic, had not done a thing to this guitar at this point.

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Body being stripped, you can see where I patched the wood in the neck pickup route. The luthier that worked on this guitar originally did a terrible job, have to fix his mess. I took a paint stirring stick from Home depot and cut it to size and glued it and clamped it into place. Then filled in any gaps with wood filler and sanded that down level with the top of the guitar. I am painting this guitar and that part will be covered with a pickup ring so it will never be noticed once I paint the guitar.

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I have pulled the neck off the body to refinish the guitar. The neck has some dings in it so I cleaned the dings with Naptha (Lighter Fluid) then I drop clear lacquer in the dings with a toothpick. You do this until you get a raised area of lacquer over the ding. Then you wet sand it down with 400 grit and follow that up wet sanding with 800 grit. Then I will use rubbing compound on the neck to try to remove any scratches. After that you use polishing compound to shine it up real nice. Here is a pic of the neck while work is in progress.

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