World War II / Pearl Harbor Electric Guitar

A few months ago I bought a used Epiphone Dot. I always loved this body style; the first electric I ever personally owned was a black Epiphone Casino with the Epiphone Bigsby-style tailpiece. Grrat looking guitar- I ended up selling it to buy my first Gretsch Nashville 6120. Which... I later sold. My collection has become a rotation of guitars. Moving on...

As seen previously in this blog, I bought this on eBay and the guitar arrived with a broken peghead thanks to some guy who likes to throw boxes somewhere in the shipping process. I've always wanted to learn to repair this classic mishap (because there are A LOT of awesome guitars out there with broken pegheads) and this was the ideal (and necessary) situation to work with.

I took out any removeable part, test fit the broken joint, masked off the truss rod (to protect it from being gummed up by the glue), and carefully saturated the break with high quality wood glue. On top of this, I inlayed steel supports on either side of the neck and filled the space with JB Weld steel epoxy. This neck will not be coming apart again. I will be doing a special "full metal jacket" over the back of the neck to provide even more support as well.

              Anyway, I added "rivets to the top of the guitar, primed, and repainted. All of the additions are to reflect a war-torn WWII / Pearl Harbor theme. You can see...

*WWII era pinups
*WWII Warhawk (shark mouth) fighter design
*"Battle damage"
*Map of Hawaiian islands
*Torn American flag
*WWII Japanese Imperial Flag pickguard
*Pearl Harbor explosion painting (based on famous photograph)
*Authentic WWII Naval dogtag on peghead (information included on this veteran)
*Authentic WWII USN pin on peghead
*military drab paint scheme
*Black pearl knobs

       The guitar has some major hardware upgrades:
*Chrome Sperzel locking tuners
*Duane Eddy style B6 Bigsby
*premium TV Jones Classic pickups
*Roller bridge for tuning stability
*1 volume, 1 tone

           Electronically speaking, this guitar is the Brian Setzer Hotrod Gretsch with the addition of a tone knob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5wQllYjtHU