Sometime in 1988, I bought this brand new Vester Van Halen model guitar for the princely sum of NZ$179. That was about all I could afford. It didn't look anything like this.
But this is the guitar. It originally had a right-handed Strat body and was white. It was a piece of shit. Maybe it still is. But it's my piece of shit, and I'm quite attached to it. This guitar was cheap, nasty, and in need of a lot of work. It was my training guitar. I learned a lot mucking around with this guitar, cutting pieces off it, and drilling holes in it. It's good to have a guitar like that, that's a tool, a testbed, that you don't need to worry about damaging.
One of the first things that upset me was/were the frets. They were made out of something weird that was a lot softer than strings, and you couldn't bend notes smoothly because the string would grab on the fret. I tried polishing them and stuff, but it didn't work. So I decided to refret the guitar, which in retrospect seems an ambitious thing for a young boy to do. I ripped the frets out, and replaced them with Jim Dunlop Ultra High Jumbo fretwire. Actually Dad stepped in because he didn't want to see me ruin the guitar I expect and helped me seat them. He also had the idea to put epoxy resin in the slots beforehand to keep them in. I was like "you don't put epoxy resin in fret slots" but we did that anyway, and then a couple of years later it became the trend for luthiers to clean out fret slots with dremels and glue the new frets in with epoxy. Good on you Dad. I levelled them with a sharpening stone, and they never really got crowned because I don't have a crowning file, but they do OK. Same frets in there today.
This is the third nut the guitar's had. Back in the 80's I was reading guitar books written in the 70's and the trend then was for a brass nut which was supposed to help sustain. Goodness knows why. Anyway I always felt like I needed more sustain so I carved an ENORMOUS brass nut out of a old bit of typesetter's brass type. Did it help sustain? Probably not. But it looked cool. It did bind the strings a little, so then I put a Graphtech nut in, as I was hoping to make the vintage style whammy play in tune. The Graphtech nut is there now, but the whammy never worked properly for other reasons.
The control cavity moved over the other side of the body when it became more lefthanded. This all happened in various stages. At one time there was an active pickup that used two 9V batteries, and they were in the new cavity as well.
The long Strat horn was first modified so that the cutaway went to the end of the fingerboard, leaving the horn length unchanged, but the horn still got in the way, so then the horn was cut off, as it is now. I find this body shape works better than a proper LH Strat.
The extremely shitty Korean vintage style whammy. The string block is made of muck metal and the string ball seats are too small so strings get jammed in there, hence I always use Fender Bullets. I carved slots in the saddles to try and get the strings lower, but the real problem was elsewhere. Took me years to do anything about that though.
The pickup is from a 70's Japanese guitar called a National Diplomat. It was a bolt-on neck Les Paul copy with a laminated top that was semi-hollow. The pick-up looked cool, but it squealed like a pig. So i boiled it up in some wax, and that was the end of the squeal. The pickup is quite mild, but it sounds so good that it gives me a hard-on occasionally. That's the 7th pickup that's been in there. It's also the cheapest. It's staying.
I endorse Glico Men's Pocky. Well actually I prefer Strawberry Mousse Pocky. I'd like to lick Natsumi Abe.
This was the real action problem. The neck slot slopes in exactly the wrong way. I made a shim out of a few pieces of x-ray film to correct it, and that aimed the strings at the bridge so that the adjustment on the saddles was usable. Wish I'd done that years earlier.
This guitar is 16 or 17 years old now, and I've noticed over time that whatever glue they used to hold the truss rod channel in has seeped through the wood and coloured the neck. Almost like a skunk stripe.
When I bought the guitar I didn't even really know who EVH was. But his influence exerted itself in mysterious ways. One day I woke up and the volume knob had turned into a tone knob. Another time I woke up and the guitar was suddenly painted red/white checkers.
Here is my tip for stopping spring noise ringing on at high gain. Wrap some medical gauze tape around the springs.