In a moment of mild insanity I snagged this nasty looking SG-3 on ebay. I have absolutely no time for this kind of thing these days and the other SG-3 I have is too big a job for me to finish in the forseeable future, but I had an itch to scratch that seemed maybe possible with this.
Hardware in great condition - no tuners, but I have a set Jonas super-kindly donated last year, replacement knobs and switch, no arm, but otherwise all present and correct.
And then this horror-show. Some clown decided the zero-fret should be replaced with a Fender-style nut. Luckily/stupidly they tried to use the original chrome string guide. Strangely, this didn't work, and not just because the slots go down level with the fretboard...but I'll come to that in a minute.
Under the hood was typically ugly. Assorted arachnid carcasses in there, in amongst the perished foam gunk...
The black paint was really soft and horrible, so I ran through a bunch of different solvents until I found one that more-or-less just wiped it off without affecting the original red underneath.
Lo and behold - the decal still intact:
Great that all the black came off easy enough, but bummer that there had been such a half-hearted attempt at sanding the original finish off...
And so to the nut problem. The original section from between the zero-fret and the nut had been removed and glued back on behind a new slot.
I heated a thin scraper and worked it slowly into the glue-line.
Now the really weird part, which maybe isn't that surprising. Whoever did this to the nut cut the new slot the wrong side of the zero-fret line, so the string would have to sit at the back of the nut rather than the front for it to intonate. Baffling.
I wanted to re-use the original piece of rosewood, but it had been sanded into a wedge and drilled, for some reason, so I ended up having to cut another from scrap.
The grain matched uncannily well.
I glued the new piece in place with some Titebond.
Then filled the join with dust and superglue.
the new zero-fret slot made the misplacement of the nut really apparent - if it had been done properly the join should have been right on the line of the new slot.
Pressing in the new fret:
The existing frets went really low once I'd dressed them down to remove some pretty brutal gouges, but I figured it was worth trying to keep them rather than just replacing them straight off. String guide superglued back in place.
The guard had shrunk a little, which wrinkles the self-adhesive thick foil shielding, raising the guard off the body.
All original wiring, but it's nothing special, as far as I'm concerned, and getting very weak at the edges of the solder joints. And lots on gunk.
Guard dirty and cleaned with a slightly abrasive polish:
New nickel shielding paint and and pickup foam, the guard shielding hammered and rolled back flat, and a complete cloth-covered re-wire, leaving out a whole load of superfluous ground and doubled-up signal wires.
And then fast-forward to it finished. I borrowed the knobs from my other restoration job.
Happy!
Awesome as usual!!
