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The bridge plate is quarter inch thick plywood


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Gibson has always been known for their lightly built guitars. These pics encourage me to try to go a bit lighter like that with my own bracing, thanks for posting!

Is that one of their "semi hollowbody" guitars?

It’s just missing bridge pin holes for the other 36 strings


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Gibson J40 I did a few years ago.

When done this thing was a cannon!

Bob

I have my Dad's J45 with the double X braces. Very thin top--you can see the outline of the braces through the top. While no cannon, in fact it's fairly quiet for such a big guitar, it has a very sweet sound. Much better than average I'd say.

Dave

Dave, your dad might have one of the radio frequency cure glue guitars. It was a short lived Gibson experiment that kind of burned the soundboard wood where the braces are positioned. It is clearly visible from the outside.

_________________
Stay with the happy people.
--Reynolds Large

Could be--it's from 72 or 73.

Dave

Needs more finger braces.

thin & tall are stiffer then low & wide.
Gibson acoustic had the worst glue joints !

They have spaces between the brace & top with NO glue.

They were just not well made!

_________________
Mike Collins

But oddly enough, back when Gibson did brace their acoustics quite lightly (and with narrow tall braces), they were messy as heck inside--much messier than the pictures we've seen in this thread but many of them sounded fantastic. Joints weren't great, but it didn't seem to matter. A lot of them have held up over time and still sound great. Go figure.

Dave

One way to keep a neat appearance is to use not enough glue to start with. Messy interiors don't bother me. Some great sounding old guitars have messy interiors. The elaborately decorated Stella guitars come to mind.

Hi Brad,
Why did you remove the top on the Gibson?

Clay,
First of all my partner owns this guitar,otherwise I doubt anyone would put this kind of money in it.
It needs new binding,a neck reset, a fret job glue several loose braces,glue several cracks, reglue the entire top and back to the lining and a new (brazilian) bridge and overspray (nitro) the body.
If it was for one of his customers, I would charge him $2000. and he would mark that up.
But since it his personal guitar and the fact that he sends me tons of work and is a great guy I will charge a little less than half of that.

But I digress....
The celluloid tortoise binding was crumbling and as I removed it I noticed several gaps between the top/back and the lining.
As I was working the glue into it the gaps,the top (and back) basically just came off with almost no pressure.
Basically the glue joint failed you could see the glue is still stuck to the lining but there’s nothing on the top or the back

So I sanded everything and reglued it with titebond.