There’s a very active market today in guitar mods that customise relatively lower priced guitars by stripping out the electronics and hardware and replacing them with top quality alternatives.

In this blog, I share how I customise a guitar I bought earlier in the year to make it punch above its weight. If you’re planning to customise a guitar yourself, you might find this blog useful.

This is a used Vintage Icon V100MRHB guitar I picked up on eBay for just over £150. This particular guitar was made in Vietnam in 2008, so the build quality of the body and neck is good. It also had Wilkinson pickups and machine heads which are great so I decided to keep them and reattach them to the finished item.

If you’re planning to customise a guitar that doesn’t have such high-quality hardware, now’s the time to make the change.

Back to my guitar. Here’s how it looked when I bought it. Although it’s difficult to see, the board was very dry and the bodywork is flat and matt in appearance. It’s also dusty, dull and lacking in tone, but that’s not an issue when you customise a guitar because you can bring it up to a professional standard as part of the process.

The first thing you want to do is strip it down; take off the strings and strip off the hardware and the electronics. This way the guitar is taken back to its basic form.

I left the bushings for the bridge and stop bar in place as I was going to refit the Korean made Sunil parts I stripped off and these were not part of the guitar mods I was going to perform. You can just see the (blue) earth wire that goes from one of the bridge bushings to the control cavity where it is soldered to the back of one of the pots.

When you customise a guitar like this one from the Vintage Icon series, you’ll want to strip out these mini pots along with the cheap and nasty capacitors and vinyl covered wires.

I also stripped out the jack socket and the box type toggle switch.

That left me with just the body shell.

Guitar mods and servicing a headstock

Turning now to the headstock. I removed the tuners (machine heads) and took them apart to service and tighten them. With these ‘vintage’ type tuners this can be very useful as these tuners were more than 12 years old.

A lot of people think you’ve just got to throw them away at this point but guitar mods and servicing to vintage style tuners can work really well.

To service the machine heads, I cleaned up the cogs and tightened the screw that holds them to the tuner’s case. I then lubed them with Guitar Grease before reinserting the post and button back for each tuner, ensuring I had them all the right way round 3 + 3 (left and right) and not too many lefts or too many rights!

Before I reattached them, I gave the headstock a deep clean with polishing compound to leave it with a lovely satin sheen. Here’s picture of the finished headstock.

Next I turned my attention to the frets and the fretboard.

In general, the frets were pretty good but there were a few high spots and some denting from 12 years’ use so I decided to level and recrown them all. They also got a good polishing and the board was fed with my favourite Dr Ducks Ax Wax (not wax but an organic oil). Yes there really is a Professor John Duck in Las Vegas, Nevada USA!

Bringing the bodywork back to life

The guitar is part of the Icon range from Vintage which is a distressed, aged finish to simulate years of gigging and the impact it has on guitars.

Whenever I customise a guitar like this one, I polish the finish to give it more of a satin sheen. To do this I use an attachment to a standard cordless drill and some finishing compound of different grits (medium, fine and swirl remover).

I guess you had to be there! But it’s much easier to see the finish in the final (professional) photos of the finished project.

The next in my list of guitar mods was to fit the wiring through from the toggle switch cavity to the control cavity. When I customise a guitar, I use cloth covered push-back wire exclusively.

The sharp eyed of you will notice that I had already fitted the pickups (after the new wires were threaded through) in the photo on the right, above.

Here’s the view from the front.

I have fitted the toggle and strung the guitar with an approximate setup and intonation on the bridge. I fitted GHS David Gilmour 10.5-50 gauge strings (see product placement) and wrapped them over the stop bar which I screwed right down to the body. When you mod and customise a guitar it’s worth being thorough with any parts you are reusing. I took the tune-o-matic apart and cleaned it and smoothed out the slots in the saddles to make sure there were no sharp edges that could cause string breakages.

Then back to the control cavity for a guitar mods, soldering party.

Whenever you customise a guitar it’s a great opportunity to upgrade to parts that are standard in guitars that cost £000s more. I wired this particular guitar in a Gibson Les Paul ’59 style.

I fitted CTS 500k linear pots to the volumes and CTS 500k audio pots to the tones with paper in oil 0.022uf capacitors on both neck and bridge pickups. Guitar mods included a Switchcraft toggle switch at one end, all the way through to a Switchcraft jack socket at the other, adding a squirt of Servisol Super 10 in each pot and toggle switch.

I needed to fit new knobs to the pots as the old ones don’t fit the US sized shafts on the CTS pots. I chose honey gold coloured knobs.

The wiring guitar mods were now complete so I re-attached the cavity covers, cleaned the back of the guitar, finished the setup and that’s it, all done. Another successful mission to mod and customise a guitar that has significantly improved the quality and output of the guitar. Sounds great and plays at its best.

(Note: I refitted the Wilkinson WVC pickups because they are really well designed and replacing them for something else would cost much more than it would be worth now the circuits have been upgraded. Of course if upgraded pickups were required it would be easy to do this.)

Before and after. There actually is more visible difference than my iPhone camera shows. Most of the guitar mods are ‘under the hood’ anyway.

Here are the pro shots of the finished item.