HB-35 BK Vintage Series : Seriously useful piece of equipment!

I needed a semi-hollow guitar for fulfilling sounds in the studio, without damaging my wallet too much...

Having seen this, and armed with some skills in altering guitars(I've been throwing screwdrivers and soldering irons at every guitar I've owned for the last 20 years!) I pulled the trigger.

The guitar arrived not entirely flawless, but not enough for me to want to send it back-in consideration of how much it cost, and what I was about to do to it!

There was a minor cracking blemish to a section of the fretbooard binding, a small depression in the top's finish where the bass side bridge post is seated and looking through the bass side f-hole there has been a small cover up job performed on the inerior of the back laminate, with a thin slice of wood-perhaps to cover a knot or other natural flaw.

I had some spare parts taken out off changing parts from other guitars to help me change this one.

Kluson tuners.

Gibson Burstbucker II(for the Bridge)

ESP/Ltd ST203 Humbucker(for the neck)

And I bought..

Brown switch knob

Black-silver top vol/tone knobs

But the most useful change is to re-locate the switch and knobs to their 'correct' places!

Drop the Neck Tone into a new hole, the Neck Vol into the old Neck Tone hole, and the 3way into the old Neck Vol. Finally plugging the original 3way hole with a simple flat dome black plastic plug from a hardware store.

OK, so the look will not be perfect, but a damn sight better than how it arrived and at this money who would care? Naturally this mod works easier on a black finsh than either of the others.

I was lucky to have what would have been otherwise more expensive change outs simply lying around unemployed, but with all this done the guitar has totally opened up and come alive!

Don't forget the construction is of laminate maple, which is fundamentally the same as certain custom shop instruments from well known manufacturers. Simply put these are made in such numbers to allow it coming in at this price point-they're principally not the easiest guitars to construct either!

At the very end this is now a very useable product, capable of outgunning other like guitars of much higher price.

Now let's make some noise!!