Model SJ

One afternoon in 1968, I watched a drunken sailor with a pillow case slung over his shoulder stagger into a pawn shop in New London, CT. Since the bag on his shoulder was very guitar-like, as soon as he emerged counting his money, I went into the shop to see what he'd sold. After twenty minutes of bickering, I emerged with a very well worn twenty year old Gibson SJ. As I already had a guitar I loved, the SJ was only around for a couple of months, but almost as soon as I'd sold it to a friend, I was sorry. Forty years later, the friend still has that guitar, and it is still one of the very best guitars I have ever known.

In recent times older instruments of this short scale design have become extremely popular, and their value has soared. While over the years we have built a few one-off commissioned SJ-type guitars, we've now decided to add this design to our roster of formal models.

As we built the prototype of this model we did our best to photograph each step in the process and uploaded images of each day's accomplishments to a blog. We've reworked that so you can see this guitar from start to finish in our Model SJ Blog Revisited.