1989 Gibson J-200
In the spring of '05 I made up my mind I was going to finally own a J-200. I sold off a bunch of unused guitars and spent several months shopping. Because I live in northern Maine, it's pretty hard to walk into a music store with a row of J-200s to try... so of course I shopped on the internet (mainly ebay). There are many new ones out there at giveaway prices, and sometimes "old" ones at prices that rival a 3 bedroom ranch house on a 2 acre lot in Greenwich, CT.
Through some research I found that some of the early Bozeman J-200s were made from old stock European Maple left over from Kalamazoo, sometimes referred to as Sycamore. This wood was bought when Gibson acoustics were made only in Kalamazoo, then it was shipped to Nashville in the mid 1980s, then on to Bozeman. According to one person at Gibson's Montana division, this wood has many frequent flyer miles! I've had more than one person tell me that...#1, sycamore has a fuller, rounder tone than Eastern Maple, and #2, the early Bozeman Gibsons were largely hand made and the quality was about the best Gibson has ever put out.
This one was offered on ebay at a price I couldn't pass up. The serial number translates to June 23, 1989. It has a few little dings but who cares? Of course I had to tweak it to my liking, recrowning the frets, making a new nut out of buffalo bone (the spacing on the original was just plain wrong!), and replacing the cheap plastic saddle (non original) with a bone one.
This is a nice guitar.
