The Electra Forums

I love it when guitars have a story...

So at the end of last quarter we had the usual boring teacher meetings (yeah, I'm a teacher) and I brought in the Telerez to show off to one of the other teachers who wanted to see it. Over lunch break one of the other faculty members was really interested, and I gave him the usual introduction to Electra guitars, explained about Matsumoku, etc etc. He was really excited, and said he'd really wanted to get a good guitar for his daughter who was going off to college and who was studying jazz. Up till then he'd thought that he'd be paying upwards of $1000 to get a really good instrument for her with good sound and action (and I don't blame him for thinking that, if you went to your typical chain music store you'd conclude the same thing). I promised him I'd keep my eye out, and if I found any great deals on an Uncle Matt guitar I'd let him know.

Then I went back to my desk, and just for the heck of it, fired up ebay. To my surprise I saw this Electra with a BIN price of 89$!! I hesitated about a half second, and then nabbed it!



From the picture I thought it was brown or maybe bronze color, but it turned out to be olive green metallic, really a nice color. I had it shipped to my place, where I went over it, did the usual setup, etc. I figured I'd take the chance to photograph it before sending it along. Part of the reason it was cheap was it had some really nasty scratches on the front, and worse ones on the back. Here was my chance to practice drop filling with super glue, a technique I'd never actually tried.



The super glue worked amazingly well, just like everyone said. I used some 2000 grit sandpaper to level it back down, and sure enough, the super glue completely fused invisibly into the finish. I followed up with some 3M rubbing compund recommended by the guy down at my NAPA store, and that took the flat haze off left by the sandpaper. There's a little swirl left in these pics but this went away with a little more polishing.



I'm guessing it's an '84 X165, from the pickup config- it's got black tuners and regular (non-active) electronics. The two tone controls are pull switches for coil tap and phase reverse, as usual.



Finally I brought the guitar in to school early one morning, and gave it to my friend- he was delighted, and to my surprise he picked it up and started playing some killer delta blues riffs- he hadn't told me he played too!



So another guitar goes to a good home, and I got some practice doing finish repair, as well as some nice pics for the gallery- another happy ending!

That's a great axe for $89 bucks! Nice work on the drop filling, too.

Hopefully your friend's daughter will get a lot of use out of it!

Matthew

Actually my friend kept it for himself, and I got another one, a lipstick red X189 for his daughter!