Was planning to list it for sale somewhere, but no idea what to price it at. Any idea? Is it even worth someone’s time fixing it up?
Search in reverb for a comparable Epiphone Les Paul to get an idea of the value. My guess would be around 300 depending on the shape it’s in. (Looks pretty rough but hard to tell from one picture)
You might be able to look up the year it was made etc from the serial number on the back of the headstock.
Cheers and Good luck
I love the worn punk look. How does it sound?
Without getting too deep into it…
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It has notable corrosion, especially around the pickups and the strings.
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Would you want to be electrocuted by testing a guitar with corroded pickups?
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Other obvious things, like lubricating sticky tuner knobs, needs new strings, needs cleanup, needs the truss rod adjusted for a warped neck, etc…
It’s not all as easy as you’d think. And looking at the corrosion on the pickups, I wouldn’t wanna plug that thing in to test immediately, I’m not in any hurry to get electrocuted.
Sure it might come out pretty damn nice, but it needs some professional work before anyone with experience would even dare test the sound.
Edit: I love how I’m getting downvoted, when I have experience refurbishing both acoustic and electric guitars. Rust on the pickups? That’s sat up so long you don’t just randomly plug it up, unless you like short circuits…
I’m not an electrician, but I really doubt the kind of electricity coming through a cable is enough do anything more than a slight ouchy. There are amps powered by 9 volt batteries.
If there is high voltage present anywhere in your guitar, it’s a serious issue with your amp. There are high voltages present within a tube amp, but the amp isolates those from the input jack. The guitar itself only generates a tiny audio signal.
Please educate yourself before insisting what is or is not potentially unsafe…
Why is My Guitar or Microphone Shocking Me?
Please do not take unknown electrical issues for granted.
It’s oxidation on the pickups. This will not short anything. This person has no clue what they are talking about.
A guitar pickup, wires and magnets, don’t suddenly start shocking people and shorting amps with “rust” or oxidation.
Have you ever worked on antique electronics? I’m assuming not, but I have. The pickup coils are likely just as corroded and probably shorted from the back side with that much corrosion, which I assume from experience is from many years of age in a humid closet or basement.
I know what I’m talking about, that guitar shouldn’t be plugged up until an experienced tech opens it up and at least does a basic inspection and makes sure the pickup coils aren’t shorted out with a multimeter, at least to start with.
Hahahahaha this isn’t an antique guitar. Those aren’t even active pickups.
You are clueless about guitar electronics and how magnetic pickups work and are made.
I’m using the word antique a bit loosely here, as I don’t know what year it was made. But obvious context clues tell me that the guitar definitely has some years behind it. There’s the obvious corrosion, plus OP said they inherited it, meaning almost certainly the original owner has passed away.
I actually spent about 6 years as a guitar technician for a band that amongst other equipment rocked a Fender Stratocaster and dual 1000W Peavey stacks.
They’d never allow such a corroded guitar to hook up to their equipment willy-nilly without a full professional teardown, inspection, cleanup, any necessary parts and repairs, new strings, set the intonations, etc.
Maybe just maybe I’ve got a more professional attitude about it, from experience.
Hell, at bare minimum at least clean the old strings and spray some WD-40 into the tuner knobs and tune the thing up, can’t tell much of anything about how an old guitar is supposed to sound if you don’t at least try tuning it.
But I still wouldn’t go plugging it into an amplifier without checking the internals first, for all I know it could end up shorting out and blowing a perfectly good amplifier.
You can literally short the input to the amp and be fine. In fact, cheap cables do this all the time. There would have to be a major issue with the amps isolation between the preamp and power amp to have an issue. This is possible, but a rusty pickup is not really the issue. You’re simply ill-informed. It happens to the best of us.
Have you ever studied Samuel Goldwasser’s PhotoFacts?
I have. I’ve actually studied it so many times that I know the typical failure mode of electronic components in almost any situation.
Amplifiers are powered by transistors (or tubes back in the day, not much difference). When they happen to be stressed to the point of failure, they practically always fail as a short circuit.
Short circuits aren’t fun, that’s why they invented the Variac to properly test suspicious devices.
Edit: I hate to repeat myself, but would you plug in a rusted toaster? Do you not value your life, or would you rather test the components and clean things up first?
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It’s nice enough that you can put some time and effort into it and end up with a really great guitar. It’s not super valuable, so you probably won’t make money on it, but it’s not crappy enough that it isn’t worth fixing.
As others have mentioned, the biggest question is the neck. If it’s intact and straight (actually slightly bowed towards the fretboard), you’re good to go. If the neck is cracked or warped, then it’s probably not worth it.