How I Restored My Electric Guitar From The High School Years
The geekiest thing I’ve done. And I’ve learned so much in the process.
When I was 17, my parents bought me an electric guitar. As a matter of fact, it was my guitar teacher (“maestro” Antonio Scarpetti) who made the purchase because he thought I didn’t know enough at the time. It turned out to be an affordable Ibanez RG270DX, Made in Korea (nowadays these models are made in China). The shiny and loud “emerald green” finish was really really 90s. I even gave it a name, “Seven”, not after the Star Trek character but because I received it on May 7, and I thought that was my lucky number.
I have played it quite consistently for a few years. Around year 2000, I took it to a luthier to get the pickups replaced and the last five frets “scalloped”. It is still my opinion that those changes improved the playability of the instrument. Later on, I bought another Ibanez, a Paul Gilbert Model 90th Anniversary (which I’ve eventually sold), but decided nonetheless to keep the old one. To be fair, it’s been sitting in its case for a very long time until recently, when I decided that the time had come to give it a new life. What happened is that, well, I turned 40 and I thought it was time to buy a serious guitar. So I sold my Tesla stocks and got a Gibson Les Paul Studio. This led me into reading a book, “The birth of loud”, about the history of electric guitars and the people who made the early models. Flipping through the pages, I realized that over the years I have indeed acquired the skills necessary to mod an electric guitar: some woodworking, sanding, basic electronics, soldering, painting. I never tried before, so why didn’t I try with my old guitar? If I ruined it, it would not be a big deal anyway.
This is what it looked like when it arrived from Italy:
As a matter of fact, I’ve found it in a decent condition. There were two chipped parts on the edge, some frets were worn and dented, and of course lots of dust, but apart from that, it still worked. Kudos to Ibanez for making a cheap guitar that you can still play after 25 years!
As a first thing, I disassembled all the parts and stored them in labelled ziplock bags.
Choosing the New Pickups
I kind of took note of the electric connections, but I decided to replace the pickups anyway. This is just a matter of taste, but since my other guitar has much better ones of the same kind, it seemed pointless to have the same setup, but of lower quality. Besides, I used to own a Fender Stratocaster Made in Mexico — a model I would definitely not recommend buying, but that has been superseded by the newer and improved Player series, still made in Mexico — which is notoriously equipped with a different type of pickups known as single coils.
Pickups are the devices that convert string vibration into an electric current, which eventually becomes sound. There are two main categories called single coils and humbuckers. Single coils, as the name suggests, are just a single line of magnetized metallic bars surrounded by a few thousand loops of a wire. They are known to give a brilliant, metallic, twangy sound, but also for being noisy as they amplify ambient electric noise (“hum”). Humbuckers were invented to get rid of this problem. That is accomplished by putting two single coils in parallel, with opposite polarities, so the sum of the two currents is out-of-phase and the noise cancels out. However, they sound different: their output current is stronger, but they also have a “darker” sound. Somewhere in between there are P90 pickups, which are a sort of fatter version of single coils.
After some research, I figured what I wanted for this guitar were humbucker-sized P90 pickups. Neither regular P90 nor single coils fit into a cavity supposed to host humbuckers. I asked for advice to a music shop, but high-quality pickups such as Seymour Duncan Phat Cats seemed too expensive for this project. Eventually, I discovered a manufacturer in the US called GFS. Skipping ahead a little, I can tell that their Mean P90 pickups have good quality and are definitely cheaper than high-end ones.
The magnetized rods (“poles”) inside the pickups can be made of different metal alloys, specifically Aluminum, Nickel, and Cobalt, hence the name “Alnico”. However, different mixtures (known as Alnico 2, 3, 4 and 5) of the three components result in different strengths of the magnetic field, hence different sounds. Alnico 5 is the most widely used guitar pickup magnet. Alnico 2 was used in the early days and so it’s still used to reproduce vintage sounds
A New Colour
I just could not tolerate the emerald green finish any longer. It hurt my eyes. Long gone are the days of cock rock and hairy metal. Welcome to the era of vintage appreciation.
So, how do you change the colour of an electric guitar? It turned out there are countless ways to do so, with a variety of levels of complexity. One thing that kept me thinking for a few days was whether I wanted a gloss or satin (matte) finish. Gloss finishes are more common, satin look nice too and in some way more vintage. Also, there are different types of paints. Originally, the Ibanez was coated with polyurethane, which is basically plastic. There’s nothing wrong with it, but history tells us that back in the day, Fender painted their guitars to look like fancy cars, hence they used something called nitrocellulose lacquer which was the state-of-the-art in the automotive industry. In the end, it’s not a matter of which one is better, but of what you want.
After some googling, I ended up on the website of a Canadian manufacturer called Great Lakes Custom Colour. We exchanged a few emails, the folks there really helped me to figure out the most effective process for my project. They also told me the matte finish was easier to achieve since you don’t have to sand it to get it shiny.
These were the steps:
- Sand off the old coat. Not having an orbital sander, I used a 80 grid sanding sponge and 120 grit sandpaper. If you want to do so, wear a mask. Orbital sanders at least suck up the dust.
2. Fix the dents and chips. I just spread some wood filler, let it dry for half an hour, then sanded it into shape. To be fair, it was not the best job I’ve ever done, but good enough.
3. Spray a sanding sealer. As far as I can tell, a sanding sealer is an unwaxed shellac which wraps the wood completely, so it doesn’t absorb moisture. As the name suggest, you’re supposed to sand it to level it. But I didn’t, and I should probably have to. Also, I bought a NIOSH respirator mask. Don’t save money on your health.
4. Spray the primer.
That was the easy part. The primer is just a white paint that has been engineered to stick to the layer beneath better than the regular paint. One problem with Nitrocellulose lacquer is that it takes a long time to dry. In this case, I’ve been recommended to spray three coats 30 minutes apart from each other, then leave it dry overnight. I sanded it a bit the day after.
5. Apply the colour paint. That’s where things got really tricky for me. To begin with, I was undecided between two shades or red, one called Tahitian Coral 1961 and the other called Dakota Red. I was recommended to try out the former at first, and in case spray the latter in case I didn’t like the coral. In the end, I was happy with the more vintage-looking, faded-ish coral paint. I sprayed three coats, but something went wrong along the way, and I’m not sure way. I got a run on one part, and some sort of grainy texture in another. It might have been due to the low temperature in the hobby room, or perhaps I should have shaken the rattle can longer. But overall, I was impressed by the uniformity of the colour and the look of it.
6. Spray the satin coat. This part, too, was quite straightforward. It’s a clear coat so you don’t see it much. If it was glossy, I should have water-sanded it to make it shiny, but I decided to save this step for a future project.
Electronics
That’s where the geeky part of me came into play. An electric guitar is called electric for a good reason: in order to get LOUD, you need to amplify the vibration of strings with some electric circuit. Historically, the first people to work on these instruments (e.g. George D. Beauchamp from Rickenbacker, Leo Fender, and Les Paul) were more tinkerers than engineers. Leo Fender started off as a radio technician. This is reflected in the way electric guitars work behind the scenes. If you are familiar with a radio, what it does is converting an electric signal (variable voltage current) into sound by the means of a speaker. Somewhere in between there are two controls: a volume and an equalizer (tone) knobs.
As you rotate the volume knobs, you change the value of the resistance of a device called potentiometer, which in turn reduces the amount of electric current flowing towards the speaker. The equalizer/tone knobs is a bit more complicated to explain, but basically what it does is to filter out the frequencies of the input signal coming from the pickups that are above a certain threshold, and to dump them into the “ground” terminal. Technically, that is a RC circuit, which is made by another potentiometer (R) and a capacitor ( C). The values of the maximum resistance of the two capacitors (Rv and Rt) and the capacitance C affect the sound of the guitar.
So, it turned out that if I wanted to change the pickups from Humbuckers to P90s, I also had to replace some of the electronics, too. So I decided to replace everything that was inside the cavity, and take is as a learning opportunity.
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To begin with, the output (“hot”) wires of the pickups have to be connected first to the switch. The switch select which pickup sends current to the output jack.
Since there are 3 pickups, you might expect the switch to have 3 positions. This one has 5 positions. That’s because while in the early days there were only 3-way switches, guitar players soon figured that if they could jam the switch to an in-between position, they could get two more sounds. So Fender introduced a 5-way switch which blends the neck and middle pickup in position 2, and the middle and bridge pickups in position 4.
In turn, the output of the switch is connected in parallel to both the volume and tone (EQ) controls. This affordable Ibanez has just a single master volume and one overall EQ. Other guitars have separate volume and EQ knobs for each pickup (e.g. a Gibson Les Paul) or one master volume and two tone knobs for only the neck and middle pickups (because who cares about equalizing the tone while doing a solo, unless you’re Eric Clapton?).
As if this was not enough already, potentiometers come in a couple of flavours. The difference is that as you turn the knob, the resistance increases either linearly (B-type) or logarithmically (A-type for “audio”). In the first case, you would notice most of the difference in volume at the beginning, while for the latter is more evenly spaced along the rotation. Thus, audio-type pots are more commonly used. However, imported cheap guitar often come with some other type of pots (D-type), that are somewhere in between, because if the manufacturers does a bulk order, they pay less.
As for the value of resistance and capacitors, the rule of thumb is that humbucker and P90 pickups sound better with 500 kΩ pots, while single-coil pickups need a lower resistance to enhance the sound brilliance due to higher frequencies, hence 250 kΩ pots are more commonly used. Also, P90s seem to prefer a larger tone capacitor, so I replaced the original one with a 0.047 μF cap.
I don’t want to give the impression that this is easy, but it’s not rocket science either. Current flow from the pickups to the switch to the volume to the output. In between you have the tone, and everything is connected to the ground. And that’s basically it. The difficulty for me was to get an intuition to translate what I learned from electronics classes to how these circuits affect the sound of the instrument.
The complicated step was to connect the wires of the three pickups to the switch, not because it’s hard, but because the space is very limited. I bought a third-hand tool with a magnifying glass to have a better sense of what I was doing with the soldering tool.
The final result was rather crowded, but it worked right off the bat. At that stage, though, the only test I could do was to hook it up to my practice amp, and gently tap on the pickups with a screwdriver. If it works, you should hear some noise coming only from the pickup you selected with the switch.
The pictures below show how the selector chooses which pickup to send to the output, before and after the replacement.
Bridge
Connecting the bridge was the easiest part. Again, you need an Allen key but that’s pretty much it.
Neck and Frets
If there is something that will make you fret about a guitar, that’s, well, the frets. You may have noticed that stringed instruments can be fretless (e.g. violin or cello) or fretted (e.g. guitar, ukulele). With fretless instruments, you really need to know where to place your finger to get a note that is in tune. On the other hand, in fretted instruments, when you push the string against the fretboard, the metal bar (fret) acts like a hinge. The part of the string that vibrates between the fret and the bridge is what creates the sound, at least in a simplified approximation. If you let the string vibrate freely, it is the nut (usually made of bone or plastics) at the top of the neck that acts as the fret number zero. The frets are spaced in such a way that the length of the vibrating string creates notes that are in tune. The spacing depends on the length of the neck (“neck scale” or “scale length”). For example, Gibson Les Paul guitars have shorter necks compared to Fender Stratocasters, and hence a lower string tension. The tension also impacts your ability to “bend” the string. There’s lots of math involved in this, but at the end of the day, you want a G note to sound like a G note regardless of the scale length: the string tension and the fret spacing has to be adjusted accordingly and very accurately. If the height of the frets is uneven, or if the frets are not spaced correctly, the notes will not be in tune. That’s called intonation.
This being said, the frets of my guitar had lots of wear and were dented in some places. Fixing the fretboard (“fretwork”) is one of the most dangerous things you want to do to a guitar. You screw it up, you have to do it all over and likely have to replace the frets, which is even more painful. Or you take it to a luthier, and pay a lot. I decided to go ahead: do or do not, there is not try!
Buying the proper tools is expensive, but the price can be motivated if that’s something you plan to do often if that’s your job. I figured that there was a cheaper but less accurate way to smooth out the frets. I glues a 220 grit sandpaper stripe to a piece of scrap wood to make a “fret levelling tool”. You want it to be as straight as possible. Then, I masked the fretboard with masking tape and straightened up the neck by releasing the tension by unlocking the truss rod inside the neck (you need an Allen or hex key to do that, I still had the original one that came with the guitar). After a bit of back and forth, I had to “crown” the frets. Again, you can buy a professional tool, or use a file. I used a file. I think it kind of worked.
I was really worried I messed it up. The problem with this procedure is that you can’t be sure it worked until you string the instrument and try to tune all the strings. So if it worked or not had been a mystery until I reached the final stage of the restoration.
Finally, I screwed the neck back in place. It didn’t fit snugly at first because of the new layer of paint. It took me a few minutes to put everything back together, but in the end all it took was a screwdriver and some patience.
Will It Work?
Finally, I polished the fretboard with some drops of Dunlop 6502 conditioner, and stringed the guitar with Ernie Ball hybrid slinky 9–46 strings. These strings give a stronger bass sound, and are lighter on highs.
As it turned out, it worked!
Sound difference before / after:
A complete song played with the upgraded guitar:
