Reborn! My trusty old ESP is back from the dead.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

The first ESP Ltd 7 string to hit my dealer's showroom back in the '90s was a see-through red hardtail with a beautifully finished maple capped mahogany body, decent hardware and electronics, and a nice warm tone. I'd recently started playing a 7, and this one was both really nice and priced right. The head bangers and metal rockers didn't want it because it's not pointy and the pickups are just plain old SD humbuckers. So I got it for a song and gigged hard with it while I built up my collecton of 7s. But as the frets wore down and I added "better" guitars, it reached the point at which it needed fret work to be playable for jazz, and I had to raise the action for blues gigs. It cost me so little and was worth so little that I couldn't justify spending the money for a fret job. So it sat in the closet for over 20 years while I played a succession of other instruments that featured a Carvin 727, an Epi LP7, and an Ibanez AF207.

I took it out last weekend to see how bad it was, and the quality impressed me again just as it did when I first saw it. I've done several fret jobs over the years with hand files, steel wool, and finishing paper, and they all turned out well. So I decided to have a go at it myself. Because I'd used it almost exclusively for blues dates once the frets got bad enough, many of the fret tops were so flat from bending that they had a sharp edge where the tops met the fret bodies. That edge actually caught my fingers and made it very hard to play. There were also many many deep divots. Here they are before the work:



After removing the strings and setting the truss rod for flatness, I inked the fret tops with a black felt tip marker and leveled them all to the depth of the worst divot. I was able to maintain the radius, which (as I'll discuss in a paragraph or two) revealed a problem I didn't realize I had with this guitar. Fortunately, there was enough metal left for me to recrown them, which went very well. I then polished them going from steel wool through 150, 400, and 800 grit paper before a final polish with jeweler's compound on a felt wheel in my rotary tool. I make felt wheels with a concave groove in the outer edge that's the same width as the frets I'm doing but not quite as deep as them. And here they are afterwards:



I cleaned, polished, and reassembled her with a fresh set of Chrome XLs (11-52) that I found at the back of my string box plus a 70 thou Pearse RW 7th because I couldn't get a 72 through the post hole (which I'll deal with later, probably by adding a Sperzel with a big post and hole). And here she is, looking almost as fine as the day I got her:



Now let's talk about the problem with fingerboard radius, I set her up with almost no relief and very low action. I was really impressed with how she sounded and felt until I got above the 12th fret and encountered faint string buzz on the G and D that went away if I raised the bridge a hair. Then I noticed that the action on the first two strings was higher than it was on 3 and 4 - and that's when I figured out the problem. The bridge has no radius across the saddles, and it was notched for equal depth of all strings. So I either had to raise 3 and 4 at the saddle or live with the discrepancy. I couldn't figure out a way to shim or otherwise elevate the saddles, and I don't have any spares to notch properly. So I shimmed the strings with a thin piece of plastic from a TI string package. I'll get new saddles and fix this properly, but for now it's working fine.



And the tone is as fine as I remembered it to be for jazz. It's not Bickert's Tele, but it's pretty good with the stock electronics and I'll try a few pickups I have in my parts bin to see if I can make it even better. I'm taking it to tonight's gig to shake it out. Here's a quick tune I recorded this afternoon to see how it sounds. I chose Body and Soul because it's the tune of the month in the solo guitar thread. So I killed two birds with one stone.

[Cunamara]

Are you sure about the woods? The back looks like swamp ash rather than mahogany to my eyes. And, at least with that color, the top looks more like cocobolo than maple. It is an attractive guitar, and I like how they did the fingerboard in ways, reminiscent of some Gretsches but with its own nuance. Sounds fine, I've played worse sounding instruments.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Are you sure about the woods? The back looks like swamp ash rather than mahogany to my eyes. And, at least with that color, the top looks more like cocobolo than maple. It is an attractive guitar, and I like how they did the fingerboard in ways, reminiscent of some Gretsches but with its own nuance. Sounds fine, I've played worse sounding instruments.

I’ve always wondered what wood was used. ESP has consistently described the LTD line as exclusively maple over mahogany. Mine was one of the first, and I thought I got it in the early’90s although ESP says the LTD line was started in 1996. And I think there were some early ones made for them when ESP was still in NY, but there’s no documentation. So I’ll never know for sure.

It’s made beautifully and has the look, feel and sound of a more expensive instrument. The neck pickup reads 9kOhms at the jack, so it’s more rock than jazz oriented. The audio track is its raw amplified sound. I just mic’ed my Blu 6 with my DAI straight into Audacity without plugins. I always liked it, and I’m looking forward to hearing it through the Vibrolux tonight.

[unknownguitarplayer]

Very nice playing!

[ruger9]

Wow, beautiful guitar! And nice work!!! How long did all the fretwork take?

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Wow, beautiful guitar! And nice work!!! How long did all the fretwork take?

Including taping, it took me about 2 hours. If I weren’t so cheap, I’d buy diamond files and a set of shaped abrasive sponge polishing sticks. That’d cut about half an hour from the process. I think I get a better polish with the rotary tool than I’ve seen from any hand polishing, so I stick to my tried & true method and I’d still use it after running down the coarse-med-fine hand smoothing. But the sticks would be faster and easier. And a set of good files would be wonderful if I did enough fret jobs to justify the cost. I’ve had my set of old fashioned fine finishing files for many years for general fabrication.