Warning: this is part 1 of a long video. Luckily, this part is short. Part 2 other ISN'T :-) But they're NOT meant to be watched for entertainment. They are for people considering buying a Reloved Guitar - that's a bog standard budget guitar given a thorough overhaul and set up to play properly.
In these two videos you'll see a Vintage brand V100 Cherry Sunburst Les Paul copy getting the Reloved treatment - and nearly getting the better of me. I paid quite a lot of money for this guitar and it had far more niggly faults than the previous seller outlined. First of these was an intermittent pickup selector switch, second was a broken tuner and third was an unresponsive truss rod. Oh, and fourth was a slightly out of position bridge (meaning I had to remove the bridge, take apart one of the saddles and reverse it to get the maximum intonation range out of it).
Not great for the money I paid for it. And by the time I get to the end of the second video, I'm starting to make mistakes (reversing the wrong saddle, then putting the bridge back on the wrong way...to name but two) and losing my usual good humour.
By the time I finished this guitar I had:
• Levelled, re-profiled and polished the frets
• Checked and adjusted the electrics
• Fixed then re-broken a broken tuner
• Upgraded the tuners with a new set of Wilkinson Vintage EZ-loks
• Restrung the guitar with new Ernie Ball 9s
• Polished out some paint repairs made by a previous owner
• Filed the nut slots
• Set the playing action (eventually)
• Intonated each string
That's 4.5hrs on this video and another hour on top of that changing the tuners and polishing the repairs. That's a LOT of work to make this guitar play as well as it now does - yet this guitar LOOKED the business when it arrived a couple of weeks ago. It just goes to show you...
By comparison, the black V100 we're also refurbishing although in a far worse state to look at (and not working when we got it) is proving to be much less trouble. And we only paid 1/3 as much for that one.
Even on a good day it takes us about 3hrs to inspect, dismantle, clean and properly set up a guitar so that it plays way better than it did when it came out of the factory or the shop. Don't forget, that's doing work that the factory doesn't do, the shop doesn't do and the person who had the guitar before you more than likely didn't do. But it still needs to be done and without it, your guitar probably plays like a dog.