Part 1: Disassembly
As soon as I started taking the guitar apart, it was clear the repair will need to be rather thorough. The person that did the original repair(s) had little understanding of guitars. There was a lot of spliced-in oak, all gluing was done with thick layers of epoxy leaving bubbles and cavities, and for good measure dowels were drilled and installed throughout for reinforcement. This is all quite unfortunate: broken necks can be easily repaired if all wood is present as tight wood-wood joints glued with proper wood glue are stronger than the wood itself.
The left pickup ring is original, the right is a shorter replacement, necessary for the pickup to fit under the
lowered strings. That's a shame since getting an original is next to impossible.
Neck pickup cavities. The right one has been routed deeper, the left one contains non-original neck extension.
Filed-down bridge and aftermarket stop-tail.
Fretboard removal.
Added wood in the neck pocket.
Two minutes with a chisel reveals the "lip" on the neck to body connection that must be there on a early '65
guitar. It was covered over in wood putty. And there is a dowel, of course. By now I call the previous repair
person Mr. Dowel (having guessed a gender..).
Spider-web pattern on the neck. It would appear Mr. Dowel sprayed the nitrocellulose lacquer with a layer of
polyurethane or perhaps acrylic clear coat.
Cutting the layer of epoxy holding the neck in with a very thin saw made of razor blade notched with a knife.
Drilling out the excess wood.
The last phase was done by repeatedly slicing a heated exacto knife blade between the body and the neck,
deeper and deeper. The neck separated quite cleanly, revealing a pool of epoxy with a big bubble underneath.
Initial cleaning out the neck pocket.
Sanding off headstock shows the repair. It is a strange mix of elaborate and wrong. It seems the holly veneer
was split when the headstock broke breaking the two inlays and the headstock was glued together, doweled again,
and a new veneer (of some other wood) was slapped on and a Gibson logo was fashioned out of a mother-of-pearl
block. This also resolved a neck-headstock angle mystery: The angle should be 17 degrees before 1965 or 14 degrees
after. I measured the angle at 16 degrees, now we can see it is because the rest of the headstock was glued on
not perfectly straight.
Cleaned neck showing the break and a spliced-in piece of wood.