Very few pieces blow my mind, but here we are...
Here is a 1950s Gretsch New Yorker 6050 Archtop pickup, pickguard and wiring harness. All works as it should, the pickup sounds incredible and the pickguard is the much rarer variant. The majority of them were tortoise shell celluloid. This one is 3-ply black celluloid with a neat art deco gold leaf etching.
The pot is proprietary, and the jack is a vintage Switchcraft that uses wood for spacers instead of plastic.
Living near Nashville has its perks. We’re not far from the Gibson factory and Custom Shop (about 25 mins), which means I frequently see boxes of authentic Gibson parts walk through the door. A lot of people who work at Gibson live in my county, and thus, I have a lot of regulars that either work for, or have worked for Gibson. A recent haul included several samples, templates, and new old stock parts from the 1950s through the 1990s.
I bought this particular pickguard directly from another local business owner who coincidentally worked for Gibson in the 1990s. He said he saved a lot of things from the burn bin and he will be bringing me more stuff as he digs it out of his attic. I am stoked to see what else he unearths. He said that this particular item was in a Gibson store room for research / templating and they were cleaning out the closet so he took it home.
Seems odd that Gibson would have Gretsch parts for research, but I bet that has something to do with either A. because this set also seems to fit the Epiphone Broadway archtops or B. Chet Atkins and a lot of others were moving from Gretsch to Gibson in the late 1980s - 1990s and they might have been doing a little R&D.
A must have for your vintage restoration or add some vintage flair to your modern archtop -- if ya need it, ya need it.
