Gibson ES-175CC - Cracks in Laminate Veneer on Sides

[Bill Eisele]

Hi All,

I'm wondering if I should do anything to seal the cracks on the laminate sides of the guitar. The guitar came to me that way so I'm not sure if these cracks have been there for a long time or not. They don't carry through to the inside of the guitar and it almost looks like the veneer didn't want to conform to the curves on the sides and eventually cracked because of that. I just don't want moisture, dirt, cleaners or waxes getting inside the cracks and I will obviously try my best to prevent that from happening. If sealing is appropriate I was thinking of drop filling some tobacco brown nitro lacquer into the cracks and lightly sanding to level it as some the veneer is raised. Is that a reasonable approach? Thanks!

Bill

.

[wintermoon]

I'm not a fan of touch ups, drop fills, etc so I'd just leave it but many here would disagree.

[Bill Eisele]

I'm not a fan of touch ups, drop fills, etc so I'd just leave it but many here would disagree.

Thanks for weighing in, George. I’m not inclined to do anything with it as long as it’s stable. I think trying to drop fill the cracks has a high probability of making it look worse. The only reason I would do it is to try to prevent the cracks from moving or getting contaminated with something and causing delamination in that area. But I’m guessing these cracks have been there for a while.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Keeping it at a safe humidity level will probably help it remain stable. I keep my archtops in hard cases with a Boveda bag in one f hole and another under the headstock. But I wonder if the close fit of the sides against the lining would eliminate the benefit of the humidifier packs for the damaged area. I’d be inclined to keep this one in an oversized case with a few small “bumpers” to hold it centered, so there’d be more humidified air around it.

I agree with Wintermoon about touch ups. A skilled luthier or tech can make local damage like that look better with a lot of work. But just dropping a bit of finish (or CA or whatever you prefer) on or into it almost always makes it look worse. I’d leave it alone. Take a picture of it with a ruler under the area and follow it to make sure it isn’t spreading. If it starts to get worse, it needs attention.

[Laro]

My own ES175 has solid sides (with fabric reinforcements inside), and I've never had any problems like that. I thought laminated wood was safe from this kind of problem...

You will find very well-done tutorials at Stewmac for repairing this type of damage!

Good luck!

[Bill Eisele]

Keeping it at a safe humidity level will probably help it remain stable. I keep my archtops in hard cases with a Boveda bag in one f hole and another under the headstock. But I wonder if the close fit of the sides against the lining would eliminate the benefit of the humidifier packs for the damaged area. I’d be inclined to keep this one in an oversized case with a few small “bumpers” to hold it centered, so there’d be more humidified air around it.

I agree with Wintermoon about touch ups. A skilled luthier or tech can make local damage like that look better with a lot of work. But just dropping a bit of finish (or CA or whatever you prefer) on or into it almost always makes it look worse. I’d leave it alone. Take a picture of it with a ruler under the area and follow it to make sure it isn’t spreading. If it starts to get worse, it needs attention.

Thanks for the tip on putting the guitar in an oversized case with bumpers. Currently it’s in a TKL case and it’s not too tight of a fit. But I also have a Hiscox case with those bumpers so I will see if the 175 will fit in there. I also use the Boveda packs but haven’t tried to insert one into an f-hole. I’m assuming you can only fit one pack into one hole.

And I have a fabric tape measure so will go ahead and make and record those measurements. Great idea! Thanks!

[Bill Eisele]

My own ES175 has solid sides (with fabric reinforcements inside), and I've never had any problems like that. I thought laminated wood was safe from this kind of problem...

You will find very well-done tutorials at Stewmac for repairing this type of damage!

Good luck!

That’s very interesting about the sides being solid. I thought they were always laminate. I really do think it’s the top veneer layer only that has the cracks in it. And it’s thin so not a total surprise there. You typically see those cracks form on either side of the jack and I’m guessing it’s also only in the top veneer layer.

I am going to leave the cracks alone for now unless I see them traveling. Then I would send it off to a luthier who has experience making these kinds of finish repairs.

[jazzshrink]

My own ES175 has solid sides...

That’s very interesting about the sides being solid. I thought they were always laminate...

I thought they were all laminate as well. Can you tell us more about your solid ES-175?

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

I also use the Boveda packs but haven’t tried to insert one into an f-hole. I’m assuming you can only fit one pack into one hole.

The D’Addario humidifier pack sets used to come with 2 pouches. One has a folding top to close it and was meant to sit in the case under the headstock. The other closes by folding the top around a thin plastic rod and snapping a channeled plastic clip over it. This one went into a flat top’s sound hole and was held in place with the clip sitting against the strings.

I put one of the clipped ones into an f hole, and the plastic flange keeps it from falling in. I’ve been doing this for years with no problems. I carry in a gig bag, so I take the Boveda pack out and leave it in the hard case. Then when I get home after the gig, I wipe down the guitar and put it back in the hard case.

[Laro]

I thought they were all laminate as well. Can you tell us more about your solid ES-175?

It's a one-pickup 2012 Gibson ES175 Historic VOS '59 (the first year they made them), made to the exact specifications of the '59 reference model, and it was built with laminate top and back plates and solid maple sides.

I don't have any picture of it in this computer, sorry.
It's still a true joy to play it every day!!!

[deacon Mark]

These things have zero effect on the guitar itself and should never cause a problem. To my way of thinking nothing worth doing a thing about at this point. Many other things would cause me to want to do that kind of major work. To have a luthier do this and get up back up somewhere better would cost more than you ever will get in return and it is a guitar, after it is new, they only way for it do go is downhill. Honest playing where is not a bad thing and while this is probably not playing wear in my book it is a nothing.

Now if you had a headstock crack or major crack in top/back then ok I see that and the value. A few marks on the rim.............play that guitar they don't get better than a 175 only different.

[jazzshrink]

It's a one-pickup 2012 Gibson ES175 Historic VOS '59 (the first year they made them), made to the exact specifications of the '59 reference model, and it was built with laminate top and back plates and solid maple sides.

I don't have any picture of it in this computer, sorry.
It's still a true joy to play it every day!!!

Thanks for your response. You learn something new every day!

[Hammertone]

Every older full-depth Gibson laminated archtop guitar model I have ever encountered has had solid wood rims, including ES-300, ES-5, ES-175, ES-125, L-4, L-50, L-4C and more. I was under the impression that Gibson never bothered to convert them to laminated rims, but I suppose it happened at some point late in the game. Perhaps someone knows when or if this actually happened?

[Bill Eisele]

These things have zero effect on the guitar itself and should never cause a problem. To my way of thinking nothing worth doing a thing about at this point. Many other things would cause me to want to do that kind of major work. To have a luthier do this and get up back up somewhere better would cost more than you ever will get in return and it is a guitar, after it is new, they only way for it do go is downhill. Honest playing where is not a bad thing and while this is probably not playing wear in my book it is a nothing.

Now if you had a headstock crack or major crack in top/back then ok I see that and the value. A few marks on the rim.............play that guitar they don't get better than a 175 only different.

Thank you for your reply, Deacon Mark. I really appreciate you weighing in. I’m not going to do anything with the 175 except enjoy playing it. The price I got it for was much less than what they are going for these days so I was happy to acquire it. And it arrived with a good set up and a fresh set of TI Swings. So all is good.

[Ol' Fret]

Like often it's hard to tell from a pic what is really going on, and sorry, I can't tell if these sides are solid or laminated!
I'd watch and control these cracks and if they would be moving, I'd stabilize them with one or two drops of thin CA.

I'd also stabilize when living in a region with higher fluctuation of relative humidity (RH) or when traveling / gigging around. Not being a follower of pampering guitars too much - these are still tools, even if some examples are quite valuable now, IMHO, guitars should be designed and built to cope with the living style of their owners. It makes me speechless if experiencing that in individual cases folks seem to treat their guitars better than their partners or family members.


Btw., I got away from the hassle around using CA in these little plastic pipettes or by means of whip tips. The working with flexible and long tips is not precise enough for using thin CA - and in about 90 percent thin CA will be what makes sense.
Of couse, you can shorten the tips, but these nozzles tend to clog like crazy, so you'll end up buying an endless amount of them and shorten, take a new pipette, shorten, take a new pipette ... Not my cup of tea!

I use thin injection needles, put their conus directly on the (shortened) tip of CA bottles. My quality needles are slightly siliconized in- and outside, which does not only help when having them to push through the skin, it also seems to help prevent frequent clogging - and, no, it doesn't interfere in any way with the working of the CA.

The advantage of needles: they are slightly flexible, but not overly so, at least in comparison to long plastic tips, thus much more precise work can be done. They clog to a much lesser extent, and if so, just put a new needle on your bottle, and on you go. Injection needles are dead cheap.
The disadvantages: you have to find out one time which needle diameter (Birmingham gauge) fits the best to your brand of CA. If too large, too much CA will flow. If too small, you have to press too much on the glue bottle which is not only exhausting for doing fine work, it also tends too clog more frequently. After one or two minutes of trial with the ideal gauge you're done.
People might think you're a junkie because many injection needles are lying around. Well, I'm too old to not be a junkie and definitely too old to care about what people are thinking of me ...


If nobody here does mind, some thoughts on guitar rims, the woods and their tending to crack will follow, based on the pic above, and two of my guitars.

[Ol' Fret]

So, let's look a the OP's pic above.
We don't know if the sides are made of solid or laminated woods, but this is easy to check - just pull the end pin or look around the output jack. It's also possible to pull a pickup and compare the grain lines of the sides in- and outside.
The grain lines of that wood or outer lamination (marked below with red) tell us that they used flat-sawn or tangential wood. Since the Anglo-Saxon terms of flat-sawn vs. flat-cut and radial-sawn vs. radial-cut wood are quite confusing, I prefer to use the simple terms of tangential and radial wood; the terms 'sawn' and 'cut' being omitted.



Tangential wood is not the traditional way of using wood for bending guitar sides. It is used, no matter if solid or laminated, because it's much cheaper to produce and is readily available at many lumber trades, not just from companies specialized on tonewoods. That wood tends to crack and splitter way more often compared to radial wood, especially in the areas of the highest stresses like the bouts, the waist or the cutaway. And if it does so, it is more difficult to repair because of its irregular grain pattern.
On the face of it, the guitar above shows no problems that would be due to the using of tangential wood. The cracks don't follow the visible, red marked grain lines; they have occured alongside the sides, not following the grain structure. This is where the problem with tangential wood arises, the wood instability in certain directions due to changes of RH. Tangential wood shrinks and expands most along the blue arrows. Radial wood sides move the most in a different direction, that is from the inside to the outside and vice versa, which is much less prone to cracking since the wood can freely move, whereas the tangential wood is fixed between the upper and lower rim, can't move enough - and finally must crack. In addition, it's important to consider that the expansion/shrinking of by far most wood species is generally two or three times higher in tangential direction, compared to radial wood!

Three possibilities here why the sides cracked like they did:
1. They used wood that wasn't exactly dry (unlikely)
2. They used wood that already had some defects in that area, no matter if solid or laminated. Maybe it wasn't visible, back then, or the quality control didn't have a good day.
3. The guitar got some seriously low RH over a longer term, and the tangential wood cracked at the weakest points.


Here a pic of more stable using of radial wooden (maple) sides for guitars. The grain lines again marked in red:




Btw., laminated woods are not less prone to cracking!
Some even claim that solid woods will last considerably longer than laminated ones. The reasons are that nobody really knows about the care that the producers of laminations had applied, what happens at the border areas between the woods and the glue layers over 50 or more years, how long the glue bonding was supposed to last, and - most important - under which environmental conditions that laminations have been kept.
Here a pic of a Roger Berlin guitar (German Carve solid top, laminated mahogany sides and back). Yes, a flat back - these are fabulous competitors of flat-back Gibson ES-150 models! After the war devastation, they had to take whatever woods or laminations were available in Germany, so some laminated Rogers were made. They stopped making them this way after three or four years, when enough solid wood had been available again.



You see not only lacquer cracks, but also a handful of cracks concerning the outer mahogany layer. The edges of these cracks rise higher than the surround level. Hard to explain through a pic, but the hands are so wonderful "keyers".

[Bill Eisele]

Like often it's hard to tell from a pic what is really going on, and sorry, I can't tell if these sides are solid or laminated!
I'd watch and control these cracks and if they would be moving, I'd stabilize them with one or two drops of thin CA.

I'd also stabilize when living in a region with higher fluctuation of relative humidity (RH) or when traveling / gigging around. Not being a follower of pampering guitars too much - these are still tools, even if some examples are quite valuable now, IMHO, guitars should be designed and built to cope with the living style of their owners. It makes me speechless if experiencing that in individual cases folks seem to treat their guitars better than their partners or family members.


Btw., I got away from the hassle around using CA in these little plastic pipettes or by means of whip tips. The working with flexible and long tips is not precise enough for using thin CA - and in about 90 percent thin CA will be what makes sense.
Of couse, you can shorten the tips, but these nozzles tend to clog like crazy, so you'll end up buying an endless amount of them and shorten, take a new pipette, shorten, take a new pipette ... Not my cup of tea!

I use thin injection needles, put their conus directly on the (shortened) tip of CA bottles. My quality needles are slightly siliconized in- and outside, which does not only help when having them to push through the skin, it also seems to help prevent frequent clogging - and, no, it doesn't interfere in any way with the working of the CA.

The advantage of needles: they are slightly flexible, but not overly so, at least in comparison to long plastic tips, thus much more precise work can be done. They clog to a much lesser extent, and if so, just put a new needle on your bottle, and on you go. Injection needles are dead cheap.
The disadvantages: you have to find out one time which needle diameter (Birmingham gauge) fits the best to your brand of CA. If too large, too much CA will flow. If too small, you have to press too much on the glue bottle which is not only exhausting for doing fine work, it also tends too clog more frequently. After one or two minutes of trial with the ideal gauge you're done.
People might think you're a junkie because many injection needles are lying around. Well, I'm too old to not be a junkie and definitely too old to care about what people are thinking of me ...


If nobody here does mind, some thoughts on guitar rims, the woods and their tending to crack will follow, based on the pic above, and two of my guitars.

Thanks so much, Ol' Fret, on how you apply thin CA glue with syringes and needles. I will keep an eye on the cracks and hopefully they are stable, but your method will come in very handy for other finish repairs which I take on from time to time. I have always found it difficult to meter out the precise amount of thin CA glue to the defect or crack and then getting it in the right location. This will help greatly.

[Bill Eisele]

So, let's look a the OP's pic above.
We don't know if the sides are made of solid or laminated woods, but this is easy to check - just pull the end pin or look around the output jack. It's also possible to pull a pickup and compare the grain lines of the sides in- and outside.
The grain lines of that wood or outer lamination (marked below with red) tell us that they used flat-sawn or tangential wood. Since the Anglo-Saxon terms of flat-sawn vs. flat-cut and radial-sawn vs. radial-cut wood are quite confusing, I prefer to use the simple terms of tangential and radial wood; the terms 'sawn' and 'cut' being omitted.



Tangential wood is not the traditional way of using wood for bending guitar sides. It is used, no matter if solid or laminated, because it's much cheaper to produce and is readily available at many lumber trades, not just from companies specialized on tonewoods. That wood tends to crack and splitter way more often compared to radial wood, especially in the areas of the highest stresses like the bouts, the waist or the cutaway. And if it does so, it is more difficult to repair because of its irregular grain pattern.
On the face of it, the guitar above shows no problems that would be due to the using of tangential wood. The cracks don't follow the visible, red marked grain lines; they have occured alongside the sides, not following the grain structure. This is where the problem with tangential wood arises, the wood instability in certain directions due to changes of RH. Tangential wood shrinks and expands most along the blue arrows. Radial wood sides move the most in a different direction, that is from the inside to the outside and vice versa, which is much less prone to cracking since the wood can freely move, whereas the tangential wood is fixed between the upper and lower rim, can't move enough - and finally must crack. In addition, it's important to consider that the expansion/shrinking of by far most wood species is generally two or three times higher in tangential direction, compared to radial wood!

Three possibilities here why the sides cracked like they did:
1. They used wood that wasn't exactly dry (unlikely)
2. They used wood that already had some defects in that area, no matter if solid or laminated. Maybe it wasn't visible, back then, or the quality control didn't have a good day.
3. The guitar got some seriously low RH over a longer term, and the tangential wood cracked at the weakest points.


Here a pic of more stable using of radial wooden (maple) sides for guitars. The grain lines again marked in red:




Btw., laminated woods are not less prone to cracking!
Some even claim that solid woods will last considerably longer than laminated ones. The reasons are that nobody really knows about the care that the producers of laminations had applied, what happens at the border areas between the woods and the glue layers over 50 or more years, how long the glue bonding was supposed to last, and - most important - under which environmental conditions that laminations have been kept.
Here a pic of a Roger Berlin guitar (German Carve solid top, laminated mahogany sides and back). Yes, a flat back - these are fabulous competitors of flat-back Gibson ES-150 models! After the war devastation, they had to take whatever woods or laminations were available in Germany, so some laminated Rogers were made. They stopped making them this way after three or four years, when enough solid wood had been available again.



You see not only lacquer cracks, but also a handful of cracks concerning the outer mahogany layer. The edges of these cracks rise higher than the surround level. Hard to explain through a pic, but the hands are so wonderful "keyers".

Thanks again, Ol' Fret! A veritable treasure trove of information regarding the different cuts of wood used and how they respond. It will take a while to digest this and determine whether the sides of my ES-175 are laminate or solid wood. I underwent a medical procedure with anesthesia this morning and my mental faculties and motor skills are not quite up to par right now. But I will comment further and report back what I find. More later . . .

[Bill Eisele]

Update: I finally got around to removing the output jack to determine whether the sides of this particular ES-175 are solid wood or laminate layers. And, I also threaded a borescope into one of the f-holes. I am including photographs for your review (the only borescope photo that shows any grain is the one I have included with the grain showing to the right of and above the pickup. It appears to me that the sides are laminate. It looks like either three layers of wood or three layers and a veneer? Not sure, but it doesn't look like the cracks in the sides carry all the way through to the inside.