This guitar was purchased as a Randy Rhodes 3 painted black with Jackson whammy and Seymour Duncan pickups.
Unfortunately, if you went hard on the whammy, the tuning would suffer. As a result the guitar was stripped down and I found that where the neck bolted to the body, there were cracks in the body from the string tension on the neck joint.
It was decided to set the neck using my own technique, after which I decided to upgrade the paint job and, yes, it now has acrylic lacquer.
The next job was to relocate the positions of volume, tone and the pickup selector switch. A new pick-guard was made along with some alloy pickup surrounds. Incidentally, the pickup adjustment screws differ from a standard guitar. I use 2 screws on the top and 1 on the bottom. This allows the angle of the pickup to be set and makes the pickup more stable, stopping it from flapping around.
I also put a DPT mini toggle switch in, which allows the front pickup coils to be switched from standard series to parallel, giving a really good single coil sound. Capacitors and resistors were wired to the volume pots to compensate for tone roll-off when the volume on the guitar is decreased.
And, that’s it… It really rocks and now I know why people dig these guitars!