A couple of months ago I noticed a cheap SG copy on sale which with an additional discount I had available dropped it down below half price. I wasn't expecting too much from it, but the price was worth it just for the looks. Supposedly Mahogany body and neck, wine red colour with a 14" radius fretboard. Couldn't resist.
There were few obvious flaws. A screw was missing from the bridge pup ring, there had been a light knock on the edge of the body and one or two on the headstock that had just slightly cracked the finished (tiny, not enough to worry me) and the bridge tone control wasn't working.
I soon found the cause of the tone control issue. If you look closely at the lower right tone pot you can see a leg of the cap is shorting to the pot input thus ignoring the pot and sending all the signal to the cap. It also explains why the bridge pup sounded so dark.
Roomy cavity, but not for long.
The end of the fretboard was also very gnarly, the G & B strings choked out a touch up high on bends, and the treble fret ends beyond around 15 were a bit sharp and spiky.
You can actually see the fret ends are raised a little over the binding in the above pic.
The truss rod was waaaay over-tight, I've never had to back a truss rod off so much before to try and get a touch of relief in the neck. Tweaking the neck and action over a couple of days I eventually got it playing quite nicely, although the neck really sensitive to adjustment. Slight tweak, no change, a touch more and it goes way too far. Very touchy. Tuners seem fine, bridge sits a little higher than I like, but is Ok. The saddle slots are a bit 'one size fits all', so may replace them or the whole bridge one day. The finish is pretty thick in places, hiding some obvious manufacturing flaws (particularly on the headstock), but I can live with it.
I was going to leave it at that for now, but after a few weeks with it I realised I just love the feel of it. The neck is a touch wider at the nut than the PBG necks, around 43/43.5mm, and just has something about it. So, I committed to an overhaul and upgrade...
I've been sitting on a set of SD P-Rails for while ready for a future build, so I figured rather than have a good of pups doing nothing I may as well give a run in this along with a few wiring tweaks.
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