Ohhh Crap I did ______ to my Guitar !!!!

[180gROC]

My first instrument was trumpet. My grandmother bought me one when I was in the 2nd grade.

When I was 15, I put the trumpet down and started playing guitar. My first six months playing were one big GAS attack. Halfway through it, I went down to the local sharks lair music store (Scalise Music in Richmond California), with my trumpet, looking for something to trade. The owner (I'll never forget the evil grin and devilish features he had) offered me a shiny green Ibanez tube screamer. The trumpet was worthless to me at the time. I took the deal.

At my high school graduation 3 years later my grandmother says "You still have that trumpet, right?" I lie and tell her of course... "Good" She says... "I paid several thousand dollars for that, and it will retain it's value or even appreciate over time."

That's how I learned not to trust sales people...

Done to a guitar? I burned a perfectly good acoustic to ashes right after I discovered Rock and Roll and right before I started playing guitar.

[Mercutio]

I have an old MIM strat that is my "project" guitar. I have changed the pickups 3 or 4 times, messed with the tuning heads, everything. Anyway, at one point in college, I decided to cover my guitar with stickers (similar to rivers cuomo from weezer:

Now, these stickers I had were actually leftover from marketing displays from the clothing store where I worked. So, needless to say, they are rather "industrial strength" when it comes to adhesiveness. As time passed, I decided to take the stickers off, however, they showed a certain reluctance to come off. I decided to use lighter fluid to loosen them as it is well known to help remove stickers. Anyway, as I sat there, dousing my strat in lighter fluid, I had an idea and:



The good news: did not affect the guitar in any way, shape or form. Still plays nicely and, other than a few marks on the bridge, shows no signs of the fire.

The bad news: the stickers STILL WILL NOT COME OFF. Only 1 of them was actually burned off. Guess they are there for good.

/end story

[bildozr]

restored an old strat
refinished it
wired it
put the ground and lead on wrong
spent hours trying to fix it
then when i found the problem i dropped solder on my strat
took off some of the new paint and scratched the body up
that i had spent a week alone painting

[stinger]

Refinished my EDS-1275 from that yellowish color to black. That wasn't so bad. What sucks is that I replaced all 18 tuners for some high quality Schaller M6 mini's. I failed to take into account the tremendous weight of these things. Talk about neck heavy. And to make matters worse, when enlarging the holes I chipped out some wood.

Then I decided to strip the black paint off and melted the binding on the necks and two inlays popped off. That was 20 years ago. This summer I am going to finish this thing up right. I have learned a few things since then so I think it will turn out fine.

[stinger]

On my first electric guitar I decided to take it apart. I removed the fingerboard. It was not pretty. That guitar was never played again.

[970harris]

The Good - bought a '56, '57 or '58 Les Paul Junior during the summer of 1974 for $350. Disclaimer - no serial number, and the thing had been stripped down to bare mahogany and then refinished in natural, and very poorly. (Whoever did the refinish couldn't have left the SN intact??? ) The guitar just resonated like all get out, though, the P-90 screamed, and the big, fat, neck played efforlessly. So I bought it using the money I was going to use to eat during a term of summer school, and subsisted on potatoes and Rahmen until about August!

The Bad? - put Grovers and a Badass bridge on it, added a neck pickup (a Firebird mini-humbucker, of all things), with a cream ring, pickup selector switch, new tone and volume controls.

The Ugly?? - So, after also putting a cream cover on the P-90, I had this mahogony-colored singlecut Junior with a cream hardware motif. I thought it looked pretty good despite the s___ty finish, others may differ. The main thing, though, was that the P-90 still rocked and I got some reall nice creamy tones out of that Firebird humbucker. No collector's piece, obviously, but the guitar played and sounded great.

The Worst - sold it in 1977 for a 1969 - 1970 era Chevy Malibu with a straight-line 6, horrible paint job, and (as I later discovered) reluctant transmission. The transmission, and with it the car, crapped out on me about 8 months later. Can you say "DOH!", as in Homer Simpson?

[BOBBO]