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Need Help identifying '44-45 Southern Jumbo


dcurrens

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I need some help from those who know. I have what I have been able to narrow down to a 1944-45 Southern Jumbo Flattop. It has a five piece neck, mahogany sides, gold script logo with the "Only a Gibson is Good Enough" gold silkscreened banner logo, and adjustable truss rod. What I need help with is that the inlays on the fingerboard are not double parallelagram pearl fingerboard inlays but rather full rectangular inlays. Also there are 20 frets instead of the normal 19. There does not appear to have been a fretboard change that I can see, but then I am no expert. The FON is very faint on the poplar block but it appears to read 2745. Could that be the 27th week of 1945? I don't know.

 

I need help from those in the know so if anyone could help I'd really appreciate it.

 

Thanks

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Maybe it's really a Les Paul? Just kidding. Southern Jumbo's don't have retangular inlay and neither do any of the flattops from that period that I can recall. Some of the archtops did though. Since you're in Vancouver, I recommend that you take it down to Pioneer Music in downtown Portland. They'll be able to tell you what's what:

 

Pioneer Music

 

Post pics if you have them. I'd love to see it.

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Interesting. Please do post some pics. As rscott points out, the SJ ordinarily would not have had rectangualr inlays.

 

As my signature line indicates, I'm at work on a book about Gibson flattops from 1942-45. Please check out my website

 

I suppose that it's possible that an SJ received, for example, an L-5 fingerboard. That did happen in the 1930s. In any event, pics would be helpful and if the fingerboard turns out to be original, I'd love to include the pics on my Registry and in the book.

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Thanks. I will post pictures this evening when I get home. I had begun to suspect that the fretboard may have been changed at some time before I got the guitar. I did'nt even know then what I got back in the sixties. Thanks

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Doesn't look like it came out very good. I can try to take higher resolution pics that should be bigger. Let me know if that's what you need cause these look awfully small. I gotta go out for the evening but I will check back around 10:00 pm PST.

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lol - way too small. I put my photos on Photobucket.com. It's free and seems to work pretty well.

 

That being said though, even on the tiny pics the binding looks very, very clean and white for being 60 years old. The binding also looks thicker than usual. The inlay looks really new as well - the inlay and binding on my own 48 SJ have yellowed quite a bit. It is possible you have a newer fretboard.

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Much better! That certainly is not the fretboard that the guitar was born with. The color of the binding on the fret board should be a lot closer in tone to the color of the binding on the guitar body, and it shouldn't have the dainty little point at the bottom. Everything else looks very good though. It probably wouldn't be hard to get it back to it's orginal appearance. Great guitar, you're very lucky!

 

The pic size looks fine. Sometimes you have to refresh the page to get the pictures to "grow"

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Thanks. I will take your advice and stop at Pioneer Music and see what light they can shed on this. I can't thank you all enought for your kind help to me, (a newbie) in sorting this all out. If they say anything interestimng, I'll let everyone know.

 

Thanks again

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Right!. I could see that from pictures of other SJ's. The fingerboard really looks like an L-5. It has the right amouont of frets, 20 and the right size and number of inlays. Could this have been made special that way since the L-5 and the SJ's were contemporaries? It's a mistery at present but i hope to uncover it soon.

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Could this have been made special that way since the L-5 and the SJ's were contemporaries?

 

I doubt it. They did put binding on later, but it didn't look like that, and SJ inlays have always been parallellagrams. My guess is that the old fretboard just got played out and replaced. Maybe at the same time the tuners got changed.

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