Every once in a while, a great guitar with a great story comes into the shop that you can’t help but sit and think about.

This 1917 Gibson L-3, in excellent condition, was a one-owner instrument purchased, presumably, used in the 1920’s for a young player who wanted to get into Hawaiian guitar. The store, probably pretty quickly, converted this L-3 into a guitar meant to play slide, shimming the nut with a piece of mahogany and putting a metal cover over it to raise the action, as well as installing a pretty sweet bridge intended on raising the action as well.

This is how the guitar sat, unused, for decades, in a crawlspace in Colorado, until the original owner’s granddaughter brought it into us. It’s since been converted back to steel string playing with a newer bridge.

Introduced originally in 1903, the L-3 was the top of the line small body guitar from the Kalamazoo based manufacturer, superseded only by the larger L-4 in 1911. With a carved spruce top and birch back and sides (as was extremely common for Gibson even through the early 40’s), the L-3 was a shorter scale (24 ¼), small bodied guitar with a surprisingly dark sounding guitar, with a nice big V profile neck with a 1 7/8ths nut and an extremely wide 2 3/8ths bridge spacing.

The pickguard mount, interestingly, is this very garish double bracket that was eliminated by the early 1920’s. All the original Celluloid is in amazing condition for its age, minus a little bit of cupping on the pickguard which is to be expected.

Besides the bridge, this guitar is all original and is in excellent condition. No cracks or major repairs, and only a few minor dings. Very slightly buzzy on the low E-string, but the original frets have never been touched, so we didn’t want to mess with them.

Comes with the original “Faultless” hard case.