Thursday 14 May 2009

Assemble Dissemble

Like I hinted at a few posts back, I decided today to swap the necks on my JEMs.

I've been thinking about doing it for days now, but I wanted to have plenty of time to slowly pull them both apart. I didn't want anything bad to happen from lack of concentration.

About 10:15 I started the delicate operation and finished around 12:45.

First I had to figure out what to put behind the floating tremolo bridges to stop them from getting pulled into the cavity. It's not that large so I stuffed a bathroom hand towel in both guitars propping up the bridge.

Then I took the strings off both guitars.

After that, off came the necks! Surprisingly the neck screws were quite easy to loosen from the neck with a screwdriver. The BRMR neck dropped out easily, while the Vine neck was a little more snug in the pocket. Some very careful movements allowed me to prize them apart.

Each part is stamped for identifying. The vine neck didn't though. I took pictures for when I sell, I can prove where each part came from.

From there I assembled everything back into position.

I decided to take the mirror plate off one headstock to put it on the vine neck. It was a little tricky to remove it. The double sided tape was stuck hard. After many small movements I finally set it free. It was still sticky enough to put directly on the other guitar.

The truss rod plate screws and string retainers were more difficult to unscrew than the necks! I managed to put the necks and strings on. Thankfully there wasn't any problem with the action or buzzing, and more importantly, I didn't cause any damage to either guitar. Bringing both guitars back into tune, there weren't any problems.

I think it was a success!

The BRMR looks fantastic with a vine. I have all the soft toys around my guitar, not to make it Kawaii cute, but to hide the mess on the couch.

The black guitar looks better than I expected. Even without the vine it still exudes an understated classiness.

Both the body and neck look clean without dents or scratches. There are just some light pick scratches on the scratchplate that are hardly noticeable.

Like I said before, I'm willing to sell this guitar. Please message me if you're interested!

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