1956 Les Paul Junior Headstock Restoration Questions

[Axe78th]

I recently acquired a'56 Junior from the family of the original owner. Early in it's life the headstock got broken and repaired by furniture repairman. While the repair was good the headstock was sanded down to the wood losing the black and the logos. He actually refinished the entire guitar a brown tinted lacquer. Perhaps the owner didn't like the sunburst. At any rate I'm in the process of restoring the headstock. This will be my second attempt as I wasn't happy with the first. The black and clearcoat went fine. I used some good, currently available waterslide logos.  Turns out I choose the wrong "Gibson" decal for the model. I used a '56 Special as a guide which of course has a different type logo with the "dot" NOT connected to the "G".  Aside from the wrong logo driving me crazy it just didn't look right.  Here's the first attempt.

https://www.mylespaul.com/attachments/img_4891-jpg.622516/

https://www.mylespaul.com/attachments/img_4890-jpg.622517/

So I'm doing it again. And after much research I've gotten up to speed on how the originals were done. The "Les Paul Models" script was silkscreened on top of the clearcoat as you know. Preaching to the choir here. 🙂 There is much debate on how the "Gibson" logo was done, silkscreen or decal. I've spoken with experts who say it was silkscreened and read in some books it was a decal on the low end models like the Junior.  I'm in the camp of thinking it was a decal. Here's an example of a "57 Junior.

http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p81/dynasonic/Music Gear/57 Junior 7-5077/GibsonLesPaul57Junior7-5077351.jpg

I had decided to not use a decal for the logo and use a frisket or stencil which I have on the way. But as fate would have it I happened to run across a batch of NOS Gibson logo decals from an estate auction of a retired guitar repairman. They are Meyercord decals from 1973 and look like this,

https://reverb.com/item/210242-vintage-1976-gibson-headstock-decal-gold-nos-100-authentic-not-a-reproduction

Which brings me to my question finally. As you see these are not your typical waterslide decals. They are face down, paper on top. I thought they might be dry transfers but they are in fact waterslide. I got some tips from Roy at R&S Guitarworks on how they are applied, he said they were hard to deal with.   I was hoping to get more info on installing them here at the Gibson forum.  Have any of you ever applied them?  BTW, those are new  tuners. 🙂 Thanks in advance.

 

Edited July 21, 2022 by Axe78th