This Gordy Redshift had been out of commission for some time and came to me with no strings and in need of some serious TLC. For those who don’t know these guitars were built by Gordon Whitham, the Gordon part of Gordon Smith Guitars. From what I can tell this was after he’d split from the company as Gordon Smith started in around 1974 and this guitar was made in 1988.
The first job was to get the frets out and start the re-fret. The board was quite “chippy” and require some filling but was a really nice solid black colour so the repairs are almost invisible. This guitar has a compound radius (meaning it gets flatter towards the bridge) which was a little more involved than usual and in my opinion doesn’t really make for a better guitar for a couple of reasons: The first being that at 9.5″ at the nut the radius doesn’t match the Floyd Rose locking nut which is much flatter. The second is that the bridge radius was much flatter than the end of the fingerboard and require shims under the saddles to get the strings closer to where they needed to be. I was reluctant to do anymore serious woodwork due to the thin fingerboard and any other unknowns that could have made things tricky for me so I decided to work with what I was given.
This finished product, whilst not absolutely perfect is a guitar that plays well and a customer happy with an instrument that works.
