This fine specimen is a Hondo II Les Paul copy. I'm not sure how old it is, but I believe these began being made under the Hondo II name in 1979. My friend's guitar teacher found it in a skip(!) and eventually it was handed to me as neither of them could be bothered to fix it up. I substituted a wraparound bridge for a tailpiece I found among my friend's collection of parts purely for simplicity at the moment. The pickup it came with is incredibly microphonic, literally in fact, as when my amp is up high enough I can shout in to the pickups, sonic youth style. It's very squealy and noisy, which I quite like. The pickup ring is from Zaphod, thank you again btw. At some point I guess I should put in a neck pickup purely for aesthetics as I hardly ever use the neck pup anyway. I put in a new jack as the original was busted, and 2 new tuners care of Fran, again thank you. It also needed a complete rewire to stop all the buzzing and hissing and such. It is now playable to a certain degree, although the action is almost painfully high on the 12th fret and above, I guess I'll need to shim or something. At the moment this is my only playable guitar as my Jag-Stang is waiting for a setup and my other partsocasters in works in progress.
Groovey - don't get rid of those microphonic PUPs. It's really hard to find anything microphonic these days - total shame. I always felt they just sounded more alive.
Good deal. I almost bought an LP "Teh Paul II" named after pope. The guy made an appointment with me and then made another one right before me. What a choad. I decided before he called back that I was no longer interested. I would have had to monkey with it to make it do bad things.
I'm still not entirely happy with it, it plays wonderfully up to about the 7th fret, then it's all buzzy and high. Also this thing has nooooo sustain. It's almost shameful for a les paul. Despite all that, considering it was in a skip and at least 20 years old it's manageable. The hardest thing is to think of a decent name for it. "Les Paul" is much less flexible than "-caster".
Nice job rescuing it by the way. The need a show on discover like animal rescue but where people rescue old guitars and do them up like this. I think it would be class.
