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I still can’t quite believe I own this guitar.
This is a 1963 Fyrbyrd, serial number 1106, finished in Moon White and bought from the original owner up in Queensland, Australia. It’s a non-sharkbite model, completely original, and somehow escaped the dreaded Maton neck twist that ruins so many of these old guitars.
When I first got it on the bench it definitely wasn’t pristine, but that wasn’t really the point. It had been played properly for decades and wore all the evidence of that. Underneath the dirt, oxidisation, tired hardware and old repairs though, it was obvious this thing was special.
The aim with this restoration was never to make it look new.
I wanted it working properly while keeping as much originality and character intact as possible.
The first obvious issue was the cracked pickguard around the input jack. Someone had previously tried repairing it with what looked like household glue, but it had long since let go.
Once I pulled it apart the real problem became obvious.
The bottom pickguard screw had completely missed the body from the factory. Rather than anchoring into timber, it was basically floating in space. So for the last sixty-odd years every time someone plugged a lead in or out, all that force went straight into the unsupported guard material until eventually it cracked.
Honestly, once I found that, the crack itself made perfect sense.
To fix it properly I made a new lower support section from Honduran mahogany that matched the electronics cavity and finally gave that screw something solid to bite into. Nobody will ever see it because it sits under the guard, but I still blended and colour matched everything properly anyway.
Hidden work still matters.
One of my favourite parts of restoring old guitars is seeing the stuff nobody else normally gets to see.
Inside the cavities were all the original router marks from the Maton worker who built the guitar back in the early ’60s. Rough cuts, uneven passes, little slips — all hidden under the pickguard for decades.
Truthfully, they’re not marks I’d leave inside one of my own builds.
But seeing them in there felt oddly personal. You suddenly stop looking at the guitar as a product and start seeing the bloke who made it standing at a bench in Melbourne over sixty years ago trying to get instruments out the door.
That’s the sort of thing I love about old guitars.
The input jack turned into a whole investigation on its own.
It wasn’t the type you usually see on later Fyrbyrds and figuring out whether it was original took far longer than expected. Early Matons seem to have used whatever hardware they could source at the time, so there’s a lot of overlap and inconsistency between guitars from this period.
Thankfully this one turned out to be correct, so it stayed.
The original machine heads were pretty much done. Some were cracked, some barely worked, and a few were completely beyond saving.
I ended up fitting a set of Waverly closed-back butterbeans and ageing them back so they didn’t look obviously new against the rest of the guitar. There’s nothing worse than seeing bright modern hardware stuck on an old instrument with decades of wear everywhere else.
One of the original tuner screws had rusted itself solid into the headstock and needed carefully digging out before I could plug the hole, drop fill it, and blend the repair back in.
That sort of repair work always takes longer than you think it will.
The fretwire on this guitar was odd. Very small tang, unusual profile — nothing like modern wire and not really like anything else I’ve worked on before either.
What surprised me most was how little actual fret wear there was. The frets looked tired but they weren’t worn out.
The real issue was geometry.
There was fret buzz all over the place and the radius wasn’t especially consistent. Depending on where I measured, the board sat somewhere between a 9" and 10" radius. Rather than pulling all the frets and levelling the board properly, which would have meant removing a lot of original material unnecessarily, I decided to work with what was there.
I re-radiused and levelled the fret tops to a consistent 10" instead.
That alone completely changed the guitar. Suddenly it actually played properly without losing its originality.
And honestly, finding an old Fyrbyrd with a neck this stable still feels slightly unbelievable.
The Bigsby B5 was completely seized when I got the guitar.
Not stiff.
Properly frozen solid.
Years of rust and dried grime had basically glued the whole thing together. Once I disassembled it though, cleaned everything and lightly oiled the moving parts, it all came back surprisingly well.
While pulling it apart I noticed something interesting too. Early Bigsbys from this period used threaded screws in the string bar instead of the pins you see today. Little details like that are easy to miss unless you’ve got one completely apart on the bench.
The bridge was another story entirely.
The original Bigsby/Sorkin bridge was honestly pretty terrible. The string spacing didn’t properly match the neck, the radius was wrong for the board, and the whole thing felt awkward under the hand. Add in a badly cut nut with uneven string spacing and poorly formed slots and it’s no surprise the guitar played badly.
In fairness to Maton, a lot of early ‘60s guitars from various makers had issues like this. Production tolerances weren’t exactly laser precise back then.
Still, it needed sorting properly.
I corrected the bridge spacing and radius issues and made a completely new nut matched to the original dimensions so visually nothing looked out of place.
Now it actually feels like the guitar always should have.
Thankfully the electronics were remarkably healthy.
Everything just needed a proper clean and a bit of lubrication to get moving freely again. Once done, every switch and pot worked smoothly without needing replacement parts.
The pickups were the real surprise though.
All three original Maton Magnametle pickups measured exactly the same at 8.12k, which honestly I wasn’t expecting at all after all these years.
And they sound brilliant.
Really bright and clear, but still aggressive when pushed. There’s a rawness to them that feels very different to American pickups from the same era. They’ve got their own thing entirely.
This guitar absolutely sounds like itself.
The original Samson case will eventually get restored as well, but for now I’m just enjoying having the guitar alive again.
What amazes me most is how untouched this Fyrbyrd really was. So many old Australian guitars got modified, refinished, stripped for parts or simply worn into the ground once American guitars became more fashionable.
But this one somehow survived.
Original finish. Original electronics. Original pickups. No neck twist. No major structural horrors hidden inside.
That almost never happens with these.
Now that it’s playing properly again, it’s hard not to appreciate how genuinely good these old Matons could be when everything was working as intended.
It’s quirky, slightly rough around the edges, and full of strange design decisions — but that’s part of why I love it.
It feels honest.
And every time I open the case, I still have that moment of disbelief that this all-original 1963 Fyrbyrd No. 1106 actually ended up with me.
