A customer brought in a fake Chinese-made “Gibson” Les Paul, to add a 3rd (middle position) humbucker.
My opinion of these guitars is generally good, for the price, and they tend to have less major (neck/trussrod, nut, pickup, etc.) problems than the real ones.
Authenticity aside, I found this guitar particularly peculiar. It’s clearly a solid-body guitar, without any F-holes, but it is 100% missing any sort of control cavity access plate:
Luckily the client was cool with me adding an access plate, so that saved me the massive headache of tying the components off with fishing line and fishing everything through the bridge pickup cavity.
Additionally he wanted a new bridge, setup, bone nut, and the frets had to be levelled.
Considering the price they paid for this guitar, all of this extra cost for parts and labor were still very worth it, to have an instrument that plays as good, if not better, than a real one.
So let’s begin!
The Process:
The first order of business is to add a control cavity access plate.
This is template is my most-used cavity template, and it works great with this body shape.
Since the back is curved, or “carved”, several shims were required underneath the routing template to hold it at a constant height, relative to the routed shelf where the plastic plate will sit.
This is after a couple of passes with the router.
The flamed maple transparent finish is a very thin veneer, and the type of body wood used for this guitar is paulownia.
The router bits were very happy for the builder’s taste in tonewood, and they cut through like butter.
This back cavity only required a few passes before I hit the original cavity.
I forgot to mention that the first step was removing all of the pots and output jack, before starting the routing process.
The pots were of the very cheap dime-sized variety, so they were discarded in favor of their CTS cohorts.
Here’s a better shot of the cavity that was routed at the factory.
As you can see, it looks like they used some sort of small dremel bit to do the wood excavation.
This had to have been done before the top was glued to the body, but it doesn’t explain why they chose to use a dremel.
With the cavity done, the shims were once again situated under the template and a shelf was routed to accommodate the plastic cover.
The cavity route is finished.
Once again with the shims, the middle pickup is now routed out.
Although the back just had a “picture of maple” over paulownia, the top had an actual 1/4" maple cap.
You can see the factory-routed wire channel starting to become visible, with each router pass.
The pickup routing is now complete.
Note that the bridge post anchors are removed for 2 reasons:
(1) to install the bridge ground, and (2) because the bridge is being replaced, so are the anchors.
With all of the routing done, the last thing to do is route a plastic cover.
Every different type of control cavity template in this shop is essentially a set of 3 templates.
A cavity template, a shelf template, and a cover (negative) template, that fits inside the shelf template.
The mounting holes in the cover have been drilled out and bevelled, as well.
Because the finish and cover are both black, and the underlying wood is very light in color, I colored the shelf wood black.
This is probably not necessary, but I like to do it just in case.
Leveling the frets. These weren’t that bad, but I like to do it on every AliExpress guitar that crosses my bench, just so there are no hiccups when it comes time to set the action.
Frets are level, and now the uppermost frets are sanded down lower than the other frets, to compensate for the “rising tongue” phenomenon, that sometimes happens.
You can see the fret dust that accumulated on the top between the switch mounting hole and the neck pickup cavity.
Good to go! Duncan pickups, Gotoh bridge, frets levelled, bone nut, new pots.
Not to be controversial, but this guitar plays and sounds just as good as any real one out there.
Perhaps better.
