Samick Repair Project...
Sometimes what really SHOULD be a very nice guitar is marred by crummy hardware. In the case of the "Cheapocaster" everything worked well together. A classic case of the sum of the parts... This little Samick was just the opposite. The truss rod rattled in the neck causing a bad resonance rattle in the key of G. It refused to stay in tune due to a top mounted Floyd Rose nut and a cheap Floyd Rose licensed bridge. And finally the pickups, pots, and switch were working well but felt cheap and the sound was underwhelming. What it DID have was a nicely made neck and body and it looked very nice with a "photo quilted" maple top and a great wine red top finish and black back and sides.
First on the agenda was to work with the neck since the rest of the guitar really hinged on getting it to work. I got really lucky with injecting hot thin glue into the truss rod chamber using a syringe and micro thin tubing (similar concept to medical intravenous lines). It didn't take much to stabilize the rod and the rod was still adjustable. Now that it was working as it should I turned to upgrading the hardware. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this project, but still wanted a good sounding work-horse guitar. I turned to GFS (Guitar Fetish) for one of their Floyd bridges, new pots, a toggle switch, knobs, and a pair of their VEH pickups. I used an old Floyd nut that was setup to thru-bolt into the neck and used the GFS nut hardware to refurb it. Other than drilling a pair of holes under the nut to mount the bolts the operation was pretty much plug and play. I topped it all off with a fret job you can see your face in, a little shielding tape, and a nice setup. I love the guitar. It's very stable and sounds terrific.