Epiphone MasterBuilt Repair and Mod

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So, what is this one all about? My friend Xav, the owner of this beauty dropped it and boom, the neck was severed just under the headstock... Kaput !

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So he gave it to me, thinking that I might be able to do something with it and if not, it would allow me to practise my luthier skills :-)

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Challenge accepted of course, here was my plan:

• Repair the neck of course. I looked for tips on the web and decided to ignore all advices and first reattach it with wood glue, then apply fiberglass + epoxy over the crack to make it really strong (of course, I had to strip the back of the neck bare...

• Repaint the back of the neck black along with the scratch plate (I really hate this kind of patterned scratch plates, nothing beats black (in my opinion)

• Make it electro accoustic: I had an old electro accoustic guitar from Aldi, cheap and pretty bad (the action was terrible) so i never really used it. However, I managed to slavage the preamp, the piezzo pick up, the jack and wiring and fit all that onto the Epiphone

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The real struggle (and the only one pretty much) was the sanding and painting... Very hard to have a shinny uniform finish with spary paint. I guess I'm the one to blame for lack of skills, but hell it is a frustrating process.

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I also had to change the nut (it disapeared) while the addition of pick up under the bridge raised the strings a little. The result is that it requires lots of fine tuning/sanding and filing to get a descent action knowing that I refuse to play with the truss rod in case I break the neck again (the neck is straight enough and will stay like this).

Not overly complicated but I did not find any other way than restring the guitar after each tweak to test ... that takes a considerable amount of time. But in the end, this guitar that was as good as dead got a second life, sounds as good as ever while being upgraded to electric! By the way, the sustain on this is amazing, best I ever tested.

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