Waterloo WL-14X

We’ve always felt that picking up an X-braced Waterloo is the closest any of us will ever come to experiencing what it must have been like to play a new Gibson L-00 back in the mid/late 1930s. Collings really did a remarkable job of capturing many of the defining characteristics of an original L-00. It’s a shame that these guitars have become nearly impossible to source.

This brand new WL-14X was ordered before the pandemic, and has finally arrived nearly 5 years on. Collings isn’t taking any orders for Waterloos and builds them at a pace of 2 per week to fulfill orders from what feels like eons ago.

The WL-14X features a spruce top with wide-angle X, a tiny, thin maple bridgeplate, small ebony bridge, and thin satin nitro finish. Looking inside the guitar, it's not all too different than a late 30's L-00, except that it's built with the incredible attention to detail that Collings has long been famous for.

The guitar has a beautiful spruce top, mahogany back and sides, ivoroid top binding, and an unbound back. The neck has a wonderfully comfortable round carve, rosewood fingerboard and simple pearloid dot markers. The headstock features open-geared tuners, silk-screened logo, and an ebony nut. Ebony bridge and pins, bone saddle, firestripe pickguard, and ivoroid-bound soundhole complete the top. The WL-14X is finished in a very 1930's Kalamazoo sunburst, with period brown back and sides. The neck measures 1-3/4” at the nut, pin spread at the bridge is 2-3/8”, and the scale length is 24-7/8”. The neck depth at the 1st fret is .893”; and measures 1.025” at the 9th.

The WL-14X offers mids that are punchy, strong, and up front; round and thick trebles and defined basses. There is an underlying warmth and rich overtone presence that makes itself shown in single-note melodic playing, and lots of horsepower at the ready when you need to dig in.

With hardshell case