'95 Korean Epiphone Les Paul 100

I picked this one up at High Voltage Music up on Capital Hill.

She's a 1995 Epiphone Les Paul 100, made in Korea (before production was moved to China)
They're slimmer than Les Paul Studio models, and have a bolt-on neck instead of a set neck.

It was hanging high on the wall for $49.99, minus a bridge and a tailpiece, and plus some stickers. I had to grab her! She had to be saved! I had a feeling she could be quite lovely.

The first steps were to document issues and abuse and formulate a plan.

Obviously, she was missing a bridge and a tailpiece - no way to string her up! The bridge is a metal plate with saddles that the strings pass over, which can be adjusted to set string height and intonation. Below it goes the tailpiece, which holds the strings and provides a connection to the body for resonance. Both important bits and both obviously missing!

Hmm. Something's going on with those pickup rings too! They're all cockeyed. Turns out they're the wrong size and have been stretched to fit the screwholes - these Epiphones have odd sized pickup rings.

No pickguard either - but screws have been driven into the body where one used to be. Yuck!

Interesting jack situation here too - it's a plastic jackplate with no screws, held on with tape. A cracked plastic jackplate, no less. Also, one of those tone knobs is badly cracked. Hmm!

Missing the top to the rhythm/treble switch too.

Some very attractive sticker selections, no?

 Johnny Bravo. You can see the Korean neckplate here. I used the serial number to look up the year.

Indie girl? Also, some packing tape to keep the control plate on. Nice!

Nice alien sticker for the headstock, and a missing truss rod cover.

The tuners were INCREDIBLY floppy, and not tightenable. Also filled with bits of food. Yum.


After cleaning off the goop and gunk and stickers, I made another discovery. The bridge pickup was dead ( or nearly so ) - just a very faint clunking when tapped with a screwdriver. I did a resistance test with a multimeter all the way back to the pickup, but no dice - very dead. I unwound the tape around the coils and found frayed bits of bobbin wire. No wonder! Beyond my powers to resurrect (maybe someday!)

Nice Switchcraft jack already installed though! (Even if barely soldered on)

I headed to the Trading Musician and picked up a used pearloid pickguard, a used pickguard bracket, a replacement knob, a switch top, a new chromed 'rhythm/treble' plate, and an 'incorrect' truss rod cover from another guitar model, as well as a new GOTOH bridge and tail piece, and a new set of Ping aftermarket tuners that were exact fit matches for the existing ones. I also picked up a silver 'football' style jackplate to replace the old plastic one.

I additionally got a used bridge pickup - what I believe is a 5416 Parsons Street humbucking pickup from StewMac for thirty bucks - it had a 5416 bridge sticker on the back and was in the used bin. It sounds nice!

Couldn't find any pickup ring matches though - for that I had to drop by Guitar Center, where, after some measuring, I found the right match.

Time to clean her up!

With all the hardware off, I polished and buffed several times, to get out the finer scratches. This is an 18 year old guitar that has seen a lot of action, so she'll never be showroom perfect without a full patch and paint job, but I think she's pretty the way she is, and a buffing makes her look very nice indeed.

Wiring was next-

Several wires had come disconnected in the cavity, and the jack had been only barely wired in, with the hot and ground joined up bare next to each other. After separating and insulating them, resoldering the borked connections, and wiring up the new pickup, I tested all the switch positions and pickups with a screwdriver and my test amp.

With that job done, I affixed the humbuckers with the new pickup rings, and added and grounded a silver cover for the neck pickup (which was bare) so that it would match the new bridge pickup (and also because it is sexy).

The new pearloid pickguard took some work - it didn't exactly match the pickup layout. I had to use a dremel to carve it out to the appropriate size, and then sand and carve the rounded corners. It worked out great though!

I took my nonstandard truss rod cover and cut it down to size after some careful measuring, and put it in place.

I attached the bridge and tailpiece, and installed the new tuners, and it was time to string her up!

After stringing her, I set the neck relief, the action, and the intonation to spec.

Uh oh! Fret buzz! Most frets above 12 were pretty buzzy. No fun.

I used my homemade fret rocker ( an old Squier neckplate ), and rocked it back and forth across triplets of frets to find the high ones, and marked them with a magic marker. Then I bent the strings aside and CAREFULLY filed down the problem spots until the buzz JUST disappeared. A tiny bit is ok, because the final sanding and polishing will remove a little more material.

The strings all then had to come off, and I taped the fretboard, and sanded the frets until the scratches were gone, then used 0000 steel wool to polish them (as well as the REST of the frets on the board ).

I also took this opportunity to re-oil the fretboard.

Stringing her back up again, the buzz was gone!

Oh, and did she ever sound lovely. That neck pickup is KILLER - a warm, round sound, very very bluesy, and the new bridge pickup sounds awesome and crisp with distortion. They sound great together as well.

I'm so happy with how she came out - I think she's a looker!
Here's a bunch of beauty shots!