Epiphone Les Paul Jnr set up

It's a Friday night special - Jan's Epiphone Les Paul Jnr in a kind of TV Yellow. It's from the pre-'Inspired by Gibson' days so while being a good, solid and simple guitar it suffers from a nasty plastic nut and some fairly uneven frets preventing a decent action. No matter - that's my bread-and-butter. Oh - it also had about a mile between the pickup and the strings on the original setting, plus the bridge was tilting and rotating forwards, robbing the high strings of any break angle over the saddle.
The cheap 'pre-compensated' wrap-around bridge is a kind of double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's dead simple, dead cheap and the pre-compensation + the overall back- and forward machine screws on the back permit perfect intonation, despite some peoples' reticence about the lack of individual string adjustability. On the other, the posts are pulling forward in the body wood and the sloppy fit between the posts and the bridge horns allow it to lean and rotate forwards in a worrying manner. Ok, so it's not going to pull out completely but it does rob the high E and B of any measurable break angle of the strings over the saddle. And on more thing... the strings have notched not only the saddle apexes but also the back edge of the bridge. Not great. I would recommend a replacement - except that you'd STILL get all that slop between post and bridge causing it to lean forwards with a new one.
So instead I set about finding a combination of bridge posts and studs that fitted better all round. As is often the case, a pair of gold posts (left over from various jobs) fitted the bridge very snugly and I found a pair of chrome studs that were a tighter fit in the holes too. Together this removed almost all of the rotation / tilt and restored about 15º of break angle for the high E and B. That's the 2nd day in the row that I've fixed customer guitar problems with spare parts from the parts bin. Result!
Apart from fitting some booster 'shims' under the dog-ear P90 to bring the poles up closer to the strings (lifting it not only required the shims but also some carefully-sized foam added to the cavity) the set up was pretty straightforward. I fitted a Tusq adjustable nut, set a low, light action (my normal targets) and levelled out the frets. There were two distinct low spots - one of which came just before a distinctly high fret causing double-notes on 15th and 16th frets. The Banana method easily took care of that. Once the guitar was cleaned, new strings fitted, stretched and intonated (with the last little bit of room left on the adjuster machine screws in the back of the bridge) the guitar was pretty much spot on. A simple punk-focused guitar with a stacked (noiseless) P90 that permits your inner Green Day to come out without a wall of 50/60 cycle hum. Niiice.

Видео Epiphone Les Paul Jnr set up канала Sam Deeks