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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