If guitars could choose their own luthier, they'd be queuing up for this guy

Ted pays his respects to we Brits by pronouncing "de-solder".....lovely ! What astounds me is that he opines that he's not the best of luthiers.....how humble is this bloke ?

My father-in-law was a WWII vet and guitarist with a big band that played swing and jazz mostly from the '30s & '40s. He had an L-5 that was gorgeous. He played with that band until he was well into his 80s before he finally couldn't schlep the thing plus an amp around anymore and retired. IIRC I think he told me his was a '68. My wife seems to remember it being a '68 as well.

Ted, I can't thank you enough for these videos. I do a bit of my own guitar repair, and for friends, but I'm no luthier. Somehow, and I don't really know why, I find your videos incredibly relaxing. Your work is inspiring, your history informing and entertaining, and you voice soothing. I really look forward to and enjoy your videos. They are a positive contribution to my life. Thank you, really, thank you.

Every time you upload a new video my day gets a lot better

I can watch these videos for hours. This is my Xanax. Sooooo calming and zen.

Thanks for your nocturnal sacrifice to bring our weekly fix. 🙏

I find myself watching many of your repair videos over again. This is one of them. Such stellar work, such patience,such knowledge, such wonderful delivery of the experience. I’ve heard you say that you’re not found of praise. But you Sir are awesome…!!!

Love your work man! Inspiring to see a serious craftsman like yourself document your work. This guitar really deserved the PAF restoration.

Beautiful guitar, beautiful work! 👍🏼👍🏼

From Jazz to Rockabilly then back to Jazz again, that Instrument needs to be heard.

They don't make em like you anymore Ted ! I wish we had just 1 Luthier like you anywhere near me .Happy thanks giving to you and your family and thanks for showing us what and how you do what you do

I love P90s, but those PAFs really suit the guitar much better. Nice work.

The part you refer to is named the string spoiler, made by Vibramate. Just to clarify. Vibramate manufactures a range of Bigsby adapters allowing no drill installations.

She's a big, beautiful girl. You did a great job, as usual.

What they did to that poor L5 is a damn crime. You did a magnificent job (as usual) to restore it to its former glory.

Excellent work Ted, you are the master!

Watched you enough to say, "If I were and an Angel with a harp to repair... you'd be my guy!" Don't get a big head... you're cool. and I'm 70." But seriously Ted, amazing work and empathic decisions for the care of the L5. Dude!!! I actually pray for you. Consider that brother! Your are the right stuff to preserve he quality of Communion. That's a true believers post.

100% agree on the pick guard. That would drive me nuts. Beautiful work as always.

Just fantastic! Thank you.

I have an L-5CES ('68, as I recall) that's cosmetically worn out. I paid like $400 for it in the early 80s and it was 'the guitar immediately available' for a lot of years. It has a bunch of wear. I do not plan on having it repaired. It plays fine. It's just worn and flakey. I no longer play it often. It is more a testament to time.

Well done young man. Well done indeed... I love to watch fine craftmanship in real time.

1:14 I always wondered why the '54- '57 Les Paul Customs didn't have a "staple" pickup in the bridge position...

A work of art, and a beautiful guitar all rolled up in one instrument. You never cease to amaze.

Nice to see you putting it straight from the butcher that abused it before. I'm currently working on a Hondo L5 Fatboy which I know isn't a mark on a Gibson but I must say for a guitar that's nearly 40 years old it's pretty solid & well crafted. Great work Ted ❤

Thanks, Uncle Ted. Sounded worlds better after your work.

I can't begin to tell you Ted how much I've learned from you over the years. I appreciate your insight and knowledge as well as your technical sharing.

A beautiful repair job, to undo the sheer *butchery* that was inflicted on this guitar! NICE job, mate!

I liked it the way it was. Staple P90s are so lovely and rare. It may have been bright for jazz, but it would have been a very classy country guitar. Nice work, but it's just like everything else now.

I would suggest soliciting repairs on a Dimebag Darrell Explorer that you can blast through a Marshall stack at the construction crews next door, but they love that sort of thing and would be asking you to play it during their lunch breaks 💀

I appreciate that you even put a video out with all of that going on - we do appreciate it with a watch and thumbs up. The guitar does look pretty sexy and sounds pretty good too. Great work Ted!

Sounds waaay better with the new pickups. And, as always, an amazing job.

another successful surgery! excellent work on a magnificent guitar. very well done.

Thank You Ted! I had the same lacquer problem on a 1972 L-5 S! Cherry Sunburst, solid flamed Maple, and gold plated Low Impedance Pickups. I'm a Doyle Low impedance luthier (huge smile). With mostly LUCK I was able to match the cherry Red Sunburst over a cigarette burn in the upper bout, but the Lacquer was just weird, and wouldn't cure. 6 months later it was hard enough to polish, and looks great..from a galloping Horse. After the color tinting into a french Laquer Stew Mac Lacquer clear gloss and made the mistake of Not testing it on scrap first. I think that Gibson used a different formulation in their finishes. For me it was a very expensive mistake for not TESTING the Lacquer on scrap before spraying a rare $7K L-5 S with gold plated LP Low Impedance Pickups.

"The lacquer's getting harder" "And Leon's getting laaaaarrrrrrrger!"

I like the previous owners hold my beer attitude. It was one of a kind

Early Thanksgiving treat🎉Happy Thanksgiving Twoodford

What a beautiful guitar and excellent repair work as always. I used your dental floss method to fish the pots, switch,and output jack in my 2 latest builds of the Gibson Birdland guitars. Needless to say it worked very nice, it was much easier than I thought it would be. I love these old Gibson Archtops, They are a lot of fun to play, and the tones are just fantastic.Thank you for sharing your talent and skills. Please keep them coming, I can hardly wait for the newest post every week, your channel is my favorite out of all of youtube land. Peace to you and all the viewers out there.

It sounds awesome thanks for sharing and Gods blessing to you and all your family

Gorgeous! Such elegance! No wonder that is a flagship model! Thank you for getting through the neighbors remodel and making this happen!

That’s a beauty. Great video! Thanks.

I am excited to see you on Psionic Audio soon!! I can’t get enough of Lyle. It’s going to be fun.

I love the big boxes! My go-to electric is an Aria Pro II FA70 (L5CES clone). Had to wait a few days for my moment of Ted zen, but it was worth it!

Love the Jazz improv at the end 👍.

Been Jonesing for a wdfrd video. Thanks, Ted!

Absolutely rad work!

I suppose the owner didn't realize he could have left the L-5 alone, and bought a decent ES125 for what it likely cost him to mod the L-5..

*MAJOR* sympathy on the destruction noise next door... I had to move 5 years ago, and from the day I moved into the place I moved into, there has been condestruction all around me. even the lock down didn't bring peace, because deconstruction was considered essential...

Such a beautiful guitar Ted. Well done on another guitar rescue. I don’t understand how people can ruin something that valuable and butcher it with non original parts, especially the original tailpiece

Love your work, like always. But this is the first one I've seen where I thought to myself, "I would have left it alone" IF I was the owner 😉

As always, beautiful work.

Nice guitar and repair. I'd suggest Flat Wound Strings for that real Jazz tone. I use D'Addario Chromes ECG25 (12-52) on my old ES-175, and they sound quite good. I tried Wound strings on it, and all the Jazzy tone went away, negating much of the reason for having a Jazz Archtop.

Thank you Ted for putting out these videos, we do appreciate the time and effort in making sure there's a weekly video. You truly are a treasure.

WooHoo!! Thanks for sharing Ted.

these are the ones that make it worth it

Beautiful guitar and amazing work!

oh man... them staple p90's though, I do wonder if they will be on the Reverb? The L5's are skookum fo sho, not really my playing style but a very special guitar, If you get the chance Johan Segeborn pushes one through a full marshal stack... epic to say the least.

I know they likely picked those Duncans for their sound, but if they'd just got the 'ear-less' versions they could have 'notched out' the corners of the 'bucker openings to fit them. Sure, you'd need to glue a couple of blocks to the back for the P-90s' mounting screws, but that's easy enough and then you don't even need spacers! 😁 You'd also want to hide the 'buckers' mounting holes to make it look nice, but a little doweling and some touch up lacquer would hide those pretty well, being so close to the pickups and also black. If they'd done that, swapping back to the PAFs would have been a simple 1 hour job (ten minutes of which would be waiting for the soldering iron to heat up, lol)!

Always so neat jobs and very inventive finding the right solution for every problem.

Man that is a lot of work to both repair the guitar and produce the video. Kudos for all the hard work to create this for us budding luthiers!

The headless guitarist is back, I was starting to wonder where he had got to. Sounds gorgeous.

Going from wincing at the beginning of this video to absolute awe. Ted, you’re awesome

I’m a fan of that wide fb binding look with the outside strings practically on the edge.

Don’t apologize for your playing, I love what you do to expose us to the sound. And truth be told wish I could play like you. I watch every video and love every minute of dialog and find myself nodding in agreement. Many thanks for sharing your time, knowledge, and work with us.

I love the stylized design at the end of the headstock!

On one hand, I do appreciate someone who throws "collector's value" to the wind and purely uses an instrument as a musical tool. On the other, did the owner have to pick an L5 to be their modding platform?

I don’t remember seeing the tuner clamp before!

This is one guitar, that I liked how it looked like before. Ill bet those Seymour Duncan custom shop pickups were EXPENSIVE. But as always, it sounded awesome at the end.

Thanks for another enjoyable video, great to see a wonderful guitar getting a nice touch up like this!

...I defenately prefered the sound of the «staples»

very cool. It looks great..thank you.

Gorgeous guitar and work, kinda makes me wish you zoomed out so we can see it in all its glory all the way from headstock to Bigsby

Ted, your insanely brilliant. Beautiful.

Very nice to see a job done properly. Best wishes from England.

I've never seen your 'tuning clamp' What a great gadget! Gorgeous guitar... nice work ...as always. Thanks for sharing

That guitar was on the Toronto used market for a long time, I thought about buying it, but the modifications and the price changed my mind.

So seeing this, and having thought recent thoughts about archtops and hollowbodies, where are the Gretsches? Don't remember them ever coming up, and don't hear much about them anymore, but at one point in time they were, like, real cool weren't they? I used to fawn over them watching old recordings of 80's rockabilly revival stuff and they've been on my list of "some day, hopefully" guitars, but they seem all but lost to the discussion nowadays.

Excellent video Mr. Woodford! Much thanks for many pieces of your work. The main being the cutting of the pickguard. For I am putting together a StewMac mini-T kit and putting a blue mother of toilet material and mulling over the best way to cut it to shape, all that for a grandniece, with the guitar itself in pink. A beautiful job on the L5! Thanks so much!

The staple pup sound reminds me of an ES 135 i once had. I fell for the looks but the sound was so thin. It were P 100 s I sold it.

Still thankful for the algorithm that matched with the channel which significantly drops my blood pressure. Thanks, Ted.

I grew up in the jewelry trades (my grandfather was a horologist and owned a small jewelry shop on Jeweler’s Row in Philadelphia). It can be replated by any jewelry finisher. I’d expect $100-150 USD

Beautiful!!!!

Gorgeous guitar. Wow! Great work as always!

Couple of nice Lifeson chords towards the end there!

Happy Thanksgiving Friend...

Insane skills. Thanks for sharing!

Ohhhhh fancy 😍! Six string superfluous sensation 😎😎😎

Love the show man. Guitar lover and fellow Canadian, keep up the great work!!!

Beautiful guitar.

Thanks Ted!

I love that guitar, but those black knobs are offensive. [ WTF?! ] OK...a bit of comments click baiting. Personally, I think that a set of gold top hat knobs with the silver inserts would look very classy, indeed. Those black ones are so...proletariat. The gold ones would better suit the upper class royalty of the guitar. Well, I'm being a bit facetious here, but that is one gorgeous instrument. The gold plating was sanded off because - drunkenness? Insanity? Ignorance? Possession of an evil paranormal entity? It kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it? I actually winced when I saw that scoured tailpiece. Horrors! Great video, as usual. I am now going back in time to see any of Ted's videos that I might have missed.

Much better now. Nice work as usual

This is easily one of the most beautiful guitars I’ve ever seen in my entire life! ❤❤❤ Actually, I have a black ES-347 that has the same classy vibe, but nothing beats a big old jazz box for that extra bit of sheer class. 😊

What a treat!!!;;

Awsome video thumbs up. I truly hope you & your family have a blessed Thanksgiving.

Exquisite guitar, exquisite craftsmanship (of course...) but (not questioning the owner's choice) all in all I liked the P90's better....and black is my fave finish too. Thanks Ted!

Ah, the things guitar owners get up to! Humbuckers without polepiece screws. Mmm, okay. 😸 I do hope the owner is happy. Fantastic work, as always. Thanks!

That fretboard is transcendent.

Good god, thank you for getting those pickups outta that poor baby. Whoever did that was a monster.

Another great video! Bummer about the neighbor's construction project, that sounds awful.