Remember that we fight fakes and do not support copies. All Gibson Corp. trademarks (logos, decals, screen prints, serial numbers) are used only on original Gibson guitars for repair purposes.
SERIAL NUMBERS
A very important thing for identifying a guitar is its serial numbers. Gibson introduced them in their electric guitars in 1953 (the 1952 and early 1953 Gold Tops did not have numbers yet) and still uses them in various formats today. Depending on the model and year of production, various ink stamps were used to apply the serial number, stamps of various sizes to press numbers into the wood, and even decals were used for a while. Very often, as part of a guitar head repair or refinish, serial numbers became poorly legible or were simply destroyed. But we are prepared for this.
Using tools designed by us based on original Gibson guitars, we offer a full range of serial number recovery or reproduction. We have, among others:
– 1953-1961 serial number ink stamps
– 1961-2016 wood-pressed serial number stamps
– “ellipse” decals used 1975-1977
– various Custom Shop Historic Reissue ink stamps 1993-present
– MADE IN U.S.A. wood-pressed stamps
At the customer’s special request, we can try to reproduce serial numbers that we currently do not have in our standard offer.
SILKSCREEN
Not everyone knows that the LES PAUL logo on the front of the headstock is made with silkscreen. For a while in the 70s Gibson tried to replace it with a decal, but quickly abandoned the idea. Many people refinishing guitars are not aware of this and instead of the historically correct silkscreen, they put a decal on the headstock.
We, the LES PAUL logo, make according to art – with silkscreen. We have several of them at our disposal, in different variants. We can also create a custom screen printing for the needs of your project.
LOGO
Depending on the guitar model, the GIBSON logo on the front of the headstock is either made of real mother-of-pearl or silkscreen *(in a few cases countable on the fingers of one hand, logo was a decal). The fonts and dimensions of the logo changed very often. Sometimes these were big changes, and sometimes just minor nuances. There were times when two or even three different Gibson logos were in use in the same year! Even today, with all this knowledge and the Internet at your disposal – it’s hard to figure it out.
Since customers often ask us to replace the silkscreen logo with a pearl one, we already have a large part of Gibson logos in our offer. We made them ourselves based on the original guitars, so they are 1:1 compatible.
Logos that we do not have off the shelf, we can create at the customer’s request. The project is always created based on the original guitar and we use real mother-of-pearl as the material – exactly like Gibson. We do not use logos from other online stores or from eBay, because in most cases they are inaccurate.
WATER SLIDE DECAL
The decal has been with Gibson for ages. Although in recent decades it has been most often used by the Custom Shop, it can also be seen on regular instruments from the USA line or in acoustics. The manufacturer places various things on it: its logo, information about a limited series, some graphics, the artist’s signature, etc.
The decal replacements available on eBay unfortunately do not contain all the details and often do not keep the dimensions. That is why, based on the original Gibson decals, we have created our own replacements. We have, among others, classics with various Custom Shop logos, occasional graphics, and for the needs of a given project we can recreate a decal that we do not have in our offer or create it according to the customer’s design.
