A guitar has been turned into a “one-off” worth about £10,000 after being decorated with 24-carat gold and mother-of-pearl.

Expert instrument repairer Kim Webber, 55, has been carefully coating the vintage Gibson Les Paul Deluxe with the precious metal and shells over the past year.

Working from his home in Bridgwater, Somerset, the father-of-two painstakingly re-decorated the American-made electric guitar after it was handed to him covered in plastic triangles.

“It was a guitar that a customer brought me just over a year ago and somebody had a go at inlaying it with plastic shapes and he basically wanted it done properly,” Mr Webber said.

“He had this idea about inlaying it with semi-precious shell and we tinkered about and I came up with the idea of using gold mother-of-pearl, white mother-of-pearl and sea shells awabi and abolone and I got a couple of designs for him and went for it.

“I took the instrument apart and rebuilt it, putting gold mother-of-pearl inlays in the neck and new machine heads on, put gold frets on and sprayed the whole instrument.”

Mr Webber, who was renovating the 50-year-old guitar for a private collector, has made a number of “one-off” guitars including one encrusted with more than 4,000 Swarovski crystals.