After many years of playing and being on the road this 2001 Custom PRS McCarty was in need of new frets, which were worn right down, and no further re-leveling could be done…
One of the qualities of the guitar was the 10″ radius. To achieve bends higher than a whole step the action had to be on the higher side, especially on the B and high E string. So a slight re-radius of the fretboard was done. With the inlays only being 1/16″ thick we couldn’t get too aggressive with flattening out the fret board so a 12″ radius was chosen. Next was the right fret wire. We went with Jascar stainless .055″ wide by .095″ high. To flatten the radius out a bit more we levelled the tops of the frets to a 14″ radius. Both the fretboard and frets were sanded to a 12,000 grit. The frets were also polished beyond 12,000 grit and we were left with 22 pieces of stainless steel jewlrey… Pickups were taken apart and split for coil splitting. The nut was made from scratch with a custom string spacing. Custom electronics were push/push full bypass on the vol pot (500k) and push/push coil tap on the tone pot(500k). Sozo cap was used for the passive tone circuit. A new nut was also fabricated from scratch.
The end result is a guitar where if you wanted to you could set it up with micro action of 1/64″ at highest frets, perfectly straight truss rod and have no buzzing on any fret with light to medium attack. The strings bend effortlessly on the frets and 10 gauge strings bend like 9’s. The tone of the guitar is super sweet yet tight and ballsy with massive sustain. The push/push pots with full bypass and coil splitting capabilities of the pickups ad a lot of new versatility to the guitar… One amazing guitar for sure in both playability and tone!
April 19 2014
