A big and beautiful 1939 L-7 archtop on the bench for a bunch of repairs. You can see some of the work done here. These repairs include new frets, new relic Waverly tuners, back binding repairs, side cracks and a K&K Devinity system pickup installation. I must say that I'm not normally impressed with acoustic pickups but this newer K&K pickup sounds very warm and transparent. I installed one of the older K&K archtop pickups in a 1940's Epiphone Emperor years ago and found it sounded very hollow and out of phase (even with correcting the phase with a preamp). Archtops can be difficult to amplify acoustically. After hearing this pickup I recommend that you give the K&K Devinity a try.
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l-7
It's been a mini run of early vintage Gibson archtops in the shop lately, and by a run I mean two (see the 1957 Gibson ES-175). This L-7 is in for new frets, new tuners and a K&K acoustic pickup.
You can really see Gibson's early banjo styling carried over in the headstock and fingerboard inlays.
Below is a quick video breaking down the guitar and pulling the frets.