This desirable semi-hollow body guitar is stamped “2” on the back of its pretty little headstock for “Factory Second." This guitar shows a bit greater than normal signs of use and wear as well as finish checking, some of it deeply etched. It has two larger than
regular strap buttons, one under the heel of the neck. It
once had a Bigsby tailpiece but now has a nickel-plated stop tailpiece. Should we tell them about the five holes
remaining at the bottom side, and the two filled holes in the face under the
replaced bridge? Yeah, well, I guess we
should. In our opinion, when new this
guitar had a trapeze tailpiece, which was later replaced with a Bigsby, which
was later replaced with a newer stop tailpiece and tune-o-matic bridge.
The fingerboard measures a lithe 1 9/16th”. If you habitually sharpen the ends of your fingers in a pencil sharpener it should work just
fine. The neck pickup is a “Patent
Number” type while the bridge is of the “Patent Stamp” persuasion. One of them is apparently replaced and as
we speak we are sweating both of them under a bright, hot light in our
interrogation room to try to find out who.
Its original Kluson tuners are, um, missing, replaced with oxidized
Grover Rotomatics. Our repair shop, in
the past, performed a professional refret and installed a new nut We note that this guitar plays extremely
well, and certainly has a great deal of merit, but is not entirely
original. Interestingly, on its
interior orange label, whose rubber stamped information is quite faded, seems
to say “ES-335TDC” but C means cherry and this is darker than the cherry we're used to seeing; also the C in TDC seems to have been hand written while the other
numbers and letters are stamped. The
pickups are out of phase and there is nothing we can, ourselves, do about that
– not that it doesn’t sound kinda cool like this, ‘cause it does. If this vintage Gibson semi-hollow body guitar from an extremely good period had been maintained in wholly
original, excellent condition and left unaltered in every way it could have been
worth in the range of $6500. Luckily
for you (since it makes a fine sounding guitar much more affordable) it has
experienced a few changes (who among us hasn’t?), and is also marked for life with
a stamped “2” which is something like Hester’s “A.” And so, as a “player” with a complicated
past, it can be yours for a lot less.