Darth Paul
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When Katrina came through, it left a good friend of mine, Scott Harney, without a guitar. Another very close friend of mine, Mike Raeder, had several guitars damaged. One afternoon while gutting Mike's house, I got to looking at the corpses of his axes. We realized, while no one guitar was worth repairing, there were sufficient parts left to make a project guitar feasible. Scott's situation came to mind immediately.
So, I took home the remains of several guitars and began the process of stripping them down and determining what could be salvaged. There was an ancient off-brand Strat copy, a MIJ Tele and a Yamaha Studio Lord. The Strat copy was in really bad shape, only the body being salvageable. The Tele body was split and cracked in numerous places, and swollen with moisture. The Yamaha was probably the best of all, while the body was in deplorable condition the bolt-on neck was intact, and much of the hardware was still in decent shape.
The end results would become two guitars - the first, a S-style body with a Tele neck. The body, incidentally, was from Mike's first guitar, and I knew I would have to restore it to him. This became a tedious project - in fact it's still on my bench. The second would become Scott's guitar. Knowing Scott, it didn't take much to figure out that a Gibson-esque style was in order.
The body was made from laminated ply, the neck was stripped and the profile modified, the headstock was reshaped, and the hardware was cleaned and polished. A gloss black finish was applied. Cavity covers were cut from stock, finished to match and all cavities and covers shielded. A new pickup and pots were ordered, while other components were scavenged from my parts bin and the remaining corpses. The end result:
Darth Paul
Says Scott, "And it's wonderfully playable too. It sounds fantastic and looks great."
Yeller
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The first birthday gift my wife ever gave me was a beaten and bruised old project guitar. It appeared to be an old Ibanez RG series that somebody had mutilated. The paint was stripped, the electronics were a mess, the bridge was missing parts, it was in horrible shape. But it was an RG and it was mine.
Initially, I just got it playable. When I got my Jem777vbk, it went into the closet to be tinkered with another time. Eventually, I made the decision to start work on it. A little research revealed that it was a first generation RG-550 body married to the neck of a Jem7rb - the obscure Root Beer finish, one of two Jems to make it to market with the old-style straight "monkey grip," and the only Jem to have dot inlays on an old-style neck joint.
It was re-finished in flourescent yellow, a new pickguard cut from stock, and all new pickups & electronics installed.
The Old Grey Beast
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The Old Grey Beast was built from parts of my second guitar - the first was an old Teisco Del Ray. In it's original incarnation, the Beast was a custom job from the now defunct Stars Guitars in San Francisco. At one point, the original neck was destroyed. It was replaced with a modified neck from an early Ibanez Blazer-era custom. Over the years, this guitar was subject to numerous modifications and damages, eventually falling into a state of disrepair.
As with Yeller, it was relegated to the closet for a time, until the desire struck. Layers of paint, hastily applied in my youth, were stripped away to reveal once again the beautiful mahogany body and bubinga top. The heel and lower cutaway were modified for improved comfort and access. The hardware was polished, and a new pickguard cut. Pickups were selected and mounted: the neck humbucker, a Duncan Distortion wired for series/parallel; the bridge humbucker, a DiMarzio Super Distortion wired in phase/out of phase, giving a wide tonal palette.
