1973 Guild Capri CE100D

Here's a 1973 Guild Capri husk I found after the vultures had stripped it clean of anything that had value. The top looked amazing and the guitar was structurally sound with no neck breaks. All it needed was some parts, and I could have a poor man's Gibson ES175 at a fraction of the cost.

The guitar has a super slim neck, "Fretless Wonder" frets, and a very shallow neck angle, so the rosewood base of the new tune-o-matic bridge required substantial sanding to get the action where it needed to be. 

I taped sandpaper to the top of the guitar and sanded the bridge down by moving it back and forth to match the contour of the guitar. I used the same method to shape the pickup rings.



Rewiring and installing the electronics on a hollow body guitar is a tricky maneuver, and something that I was really looking forward to doing with this project. I started by completing the wiring harness on a template outside of the guitar.

Then all the parts need to be installed through the pickup openings on the top of the guitar. I used clear tubing to thread the output jack and pots into their respective holes.

Clear tubing is labeled and threaded into the control holes and out the lead pickup opening.

Each tube is then attached to it's respective pot and output jack

Everything looks like a big mess at this point but you just need to pull on the tubes and it all comes together at once. The pots are then secured in place by threading the nuts over the tubing. Pickups are a stock set of Gibson Humbuckers (490R and 498T).

     Everything is put back into the guitar through the lead pickup opening & pulled into place.

And here it is all finished.