Making a El-Cheapo guitar sound and play good! for under RM 600

A customer came in today with a nice sexy gibson black beauty....
Was sexy alright.. only problem is, the tone's just not the "les paul" tone !!
we were fiddling around with it and came to a suprise... Guitar was a FAKE!!! Chinese Fakes!!
The radius of the fretboard was a 12" , but funny enough, the radius did not match both the bridge and pickup's.
The owner then asked us to do what we can to make it sound and feels good.. so we did.
Here's what we did....
- Chinese guitars have tendecies to have bad fret work, which explains why the action couldnt go low without a huge buzz around. we made a nice and slow 12"-14" compound radiusing in the end. we used Gibson's tall medium frets here.
- we changed the pickups to original seth lovers.. ( phew... was hard to find!!)
-Chnaged the nuts to Micarta's , changed the bridge to gotoh tune-no-matic nashville
-got good some nice sperzel tuners!!
-the pots we're changed to a very sweet alexendro 650k pots with .24up caps. RARE huh. but really did help blend in the sound to the Indonesian Mahogany- which had brighter character then the regular mahogany.

Well, i'm not gonna lie... if i would say it sounded like a 58's gibson les paul, i'll be a big fat liar...
However, it made the owner really happy . check out the pic's above for the factory fret work.. ( Gross...) and the next photo was after some leveling and polishing.
also look at the new fretbaord polisher that we got!! shining fretboard!!! ( included free for all our services)
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"Dragon" Bass- Project

Maple
This project was brought in with these few custom works in Mind.
-It was semi fretless before ( i did the semi fretless work a year back - idea was to be able to have 12 fretted frets and 12 fretless for the fretless sound )
- Rose wood to Maple Fingerboard ( Northern Maple in this case)
-From Regular Frets- to FAN FRETS!! CHECK IT OUT!!!! 3 scale lengths in 1 neck.
-To change to Xtra Jumbo Frets on 1-14 frets, Medium Jumbo on 15-20'th fret and Medium tall from 21st- 25th ( yes 25 fret)
-To add a custom preamp for overdrive ONboard! ( man... my job's getting tough here....)
-To add a nice pearloid Headstock Veneer wit a lil's John L logo on it .
how ever, the end product turned out superb. :D
Shop crews were pretty beaten up, we spent 2 whole nights working on it.
more pictures up soon.

Welcome To John L. Guitars

Thanks for visiting John L Custom Guitar Works.
John L guitars is a dedicated company dealing mainly with custom guitar works and regular services such as setups, refrettings, electronics etc. Laltely, we added in our new addition to the company, Custom Amp finishing. ( check it out).
Visit Us at our main workshop in SS2 P.J and have a chat with our fellow technicians or even John himself! Or, Just drop your axe at your nearest participating John L guitars servcing outlets , Just look out for the John L Banner!!
Meanwhile, have fun browsing thru our list of services and some interesting weekly guitar expereince/ project done by John and his fellow shop mates. Coming Soon -Custom DRUM PROJECTS