This 2002 EVH Peavey Wolfgang was a privilege to work on!!
The client, who is a die hard Van Halen fan had played the guitar so much the frets were worn out. It was time to bring the fretboard back to life and increase it’s performance beyond factory. There were a few other little issues that we wanted to address as well.
I suggested we do a refret with our custom Stainless Steel wire. This way it would be the last time this guitar would ever need to be refretted. We did a slight over radius of the fretboard from 15″ to 16″. Sanded to a super high grit to let the amazing birds eye maple really pop!! This enabled us to true the fretboard and take out a few humps and high spots. So now we were able to begin the refret with a flawless playing field. 2 coats of our secret sauce oil were applied, which will apply maximum protection to the fingerboard but keep the true wood feel. The new frets were installed, barely any levelling had to be done (3-4 passes), crowned and polished to super high gloss. Now we have 22 beautiful pieces of stainless steel jewellery installed on a beautiful guitar.. The results were amazing! Effortless bending (10′s feel like 9′s) louder, more sustain and harmonic content. This guitar is an amazing playing instrument and a TONE monster!
The bottom of the nut had some machineing flaws so it was filed and polished, and set to a height of 0.005″ above fret 1. At the factory the neck was shimmed back to create a slight tilt to create more consistent action along the fretboard, but it wasn’t enough. The thin plastic was replaced with a maple shim at 0.047″ thickness to yield a 6 degree tilt in the neck for superb action from fret 1 to 22.
Read on and enjoy the photos!
