SC2 rehab..."The Green Monster"

I purchased this abused SC2 off Ebay a few years back for a little over 2 bills. I intended to part the beast out and keep some parts I needed. When I got it I was shocked at how well it played and sounded, so I decided to try a little resto project.
Here is the body as I received it. Note the huge sanding divot on the face as well as the altered body.


I let my planer do most of the finish removal. Check out the sanding divot.


Because of the huge amount of surface damage I had to remove a lot of the original body material. At this point I decided to slap a flamed maple cap on the old body as this would help bring the thickness back up to spec as well as provide some tasty flame for the 'burst finish I wanted.
After I planed the body down I made a template of the original pick, bridge and control routs so I could find them under the new cap.


For those of you interested in a visual of how different SC2 pickup spacing is compared to an ASAT, here you go.


Here is the body with the new flame maple cap. You probably will have observed that building a new body would have been far easier. But that's not how I roll. I slo saved the paint removal on the sides for this stage of the project.


Moving on the the final sanding. Here is the body prepped and ready to seal.


I really like nitro finished guitars so I ordered a 60 bucks worth of supplies from Reranch and started spraying.
Here it is ready for sanding and clear coat.


With the neck fitted, hardware placed and prior to final assembly. Note the F100 knobs...I hate the original ones!



And the finished product! Not bad for an investment of less than $300.00 and a little labor. The cool thing is that underneath it all it still retains the original maple body. My only complaint is that it still has the original low frets. At some point I'll get to that as well.

Wow, Very nice!

You do some fine work Sir!

That is one purty geetar! Nice work on that one.

RickT

WOW!
Very nice job and thanks for the P-up comparison. With the flame top how do you think that changes tone, brighter or darker. I'm no woodworker so interested in you opinion on how it affects tone.

Again, impressive geetar!

The flame top did not change the tone...the original body was NW Maple and the flame top is NW Maple as well. The thinner body as well as the tighter neck pocket and bridge rout made it much more lively. It's a great little guitar and was a fun project.

You did a great job on that guitar!

I am tempted to do the same kind of thing on my old SB2 bass, but I would be removing an original finish. That is against my grain to change an original finish, but I love the flame maple top and sunburst finish.

-bassman

Very cool man!

Such a pretty guitar, and I bet it does sound like a million bucks!

Wow! Fantastic work. As a one-time owner of an SC-1 I was thinking: "fret job and new radius"

Kick that neck radius out to 12" and put some med. jumbos on there.

Congrats on such a cool guitar.

Very nice - awesome work.