1954 Gibson J185 Sunburst

1954 Gibson J185 Sunburst

This is the second vintage Gibson J185 I have seen in the last 12 years, a rare guitar in its own right, but crazy rare this side of the pond. This example was faithfully restored by Ghruns guitars around 1978 with included documentation and has just benefitted from a professional neck reset and internal check over making for an extremely playable and incredible sounding guitar ensuring perfect performance for years to come. The J185 has all the cool appointments you could wish for such as the 16″ wide body width, double parallelogram fretboard markers, Maltese cross bridge, gold Kluson tuners (one of which is a later double line replacement) and shaped celluloid pick guard. Only a 1000 of these produced between 1951 and 1959 before the Everly’s signature 16″ guitar arguably took over but not nearly in the same ball park as the superior J185. This one as noted was completely re finished in the mid to late 1970’s and has various cracks attended to and repaired mainly to the top by Ghrun’s and recently checked and upgraded as necessary. As mentioned earlier we have had the neck reset and as a result the guitar plays extremely well on good frets. There is a small crack in the back near the lower rim which escapes any repairs itself. There is repaired crack in the neck at the back of the nut that has been repaired maybe from the result of an over tightened truss rod in the past or a bump that resulted in the top E tuner replacement, However the truss rod is in perfect working order and does its job with what looks to be a replacement truss rod cover. The sound is very even across the strings with no booming bass that the larger Jumbos give making for a very articulate guitar but with plenty of volume when needed. This guitar would record extremely well both for finger style and chord work.

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