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1995 Gibson J-100 Rosewood Information Please


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Does anyone have any info on the 1995 Gibson J-100 Rosewood? I recently acquired this guitar and there's so little info out there on it. It's stamped J-100 Rosewood. Not an Xtra. Original tuners were Grover style with a single screw. I swapped out Gibson Deluxe and added bone bridge pins. Gold headstock logo. It has some minor play wear but in really nice shape for a 28 year old guitar.

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Edited by Joel Ross
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Don't know if the OP is still looking for info, but I worked there during that time and remember those guitars well. I don't think many of them were made in the end as I recall  about half of them had backs that sunk, which was a very uncommon problem on the line at the time making it stand out in my memory. My best guess is there were around 100 of them in total, it was a short run and they all went through in less than a month, feels like it was a couple weeks for the majority with some stragglers for a while following. Those that did not have sunken backs were great guitars for the price.

There were around 6 or 8 that were actually J200 rosewood bodies with J100 necks on them, which can be easily identified by the fact that they had the full binding package of the J200 while the standard J100 Rosewood had a J100 binding package. Gibson was very numbers driven at the time and we were producing about 50 guitars per day as the goal. I can't say with 100% certainty, but I believe those 6 or 8 with the J200 bodies were actually completely numbers driven on a day where there were no J200 necks in sight and no j100 bodies in sight in the woodshop. You had some j200 bodies and some j100 necks sitting on the racks, and probably a shortage on numbers for the day, which led to someone deciding to just put them together.

I bought one of them right off the line, it's beautiful instrument! Employees were allowed to purchase 1 instrument per year at about half the sticker price (distributor price I think). I remember my boss at the time trying to decide what I would pay since it wasn't a model available at the time. A J200 rosewood was like $3500 retail, but good fortune had it that the J100 Rosewood instruments went onto the line at around the same time and I never heard a reason for this. He eventually decided that I would just pay the standard J100 Rosewood price, which I recall paying around $800 for, which means that the retail was about $1600. I think that was about a $100 upcharge over the standard J100 which I remember being more like $1500 retail. Sounds like a great deal on my J100 with the J200 body (and it was), I'm sure, but remember that we were making about $5 per hour to build these instruments, so that was a full month's pay. I don't have that guitar any longer, but sold it to a close friend and see it often. 

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