#154702  by PaintedMandolin
 
Hey Now RUKindPeeps....

I've lingered here over the years just laying back and observing.

I am a multi-instrumentalist living in San Francisco - seeing tons of shows and playing many too.

I own a bunch of instruments and have in the past years had a passion for Graphite necked ones.

Recently I obtained a Hohner Frankenstrat with a Modulus neck.
I got it pretty cheap - $250. But it's clear to me it's gonna take some time and $ to resurrect into something cool.

The action is at this time pretty severely high but I believe it's cause the Steinberger K-Trem bridge suffers from a design defect that I only learned about by googling.
http://www.headless-europe.eu/Bernds_Gu ... _Trem.html

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"The Steinberger KB trem was used on several guitars in the late 1980ies (Gibson, Epiphone, Hohner, and maybe others). If you own such a guitar, then the photo below most likely displays what your tremolo looks like. I‘m pretty sure that almost all of them suffer from the “bent posts syndrome”. Due to the weakness of a component (the posts and the pedestal they‘re mounted on), the trem doesn’t work as it should, intonation of the guitar is way off, and – if at all – you can play the guitar with a locked trem. If this is the case and you want to fix it, you should download the PDF linked below, explaining the problem… and the solution.

NEW: another weak part of this trem is the spring tension adjuster, a combination of a threaded bolt and a moving plate which compresses the spring. On many trems the thread on either the bolt or the plate is stripped. Once this happens, you cannot adjust the spring tension, which also leads to an unusable trem. You may continue to use it only in locked mode (as a fixed bridge)… or get a new, improved spring tension adjuster :-)"

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Anyway - lucky for me my local Luthier is Rich Hoeg (who built Bobby's Blue Lightning Bolt and several of his strats and teles as well as having worked on dozens of guitars as a luthier for Modulus back in the day.

I am hoping he can resurrect this beast and make it playable, though it seems more of a shredder axe than something Weir might play as it's got a hum-sing-hum pick up config and the output of these pick-ups is hot.

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Incidentally, my other Graphite instruments are:
Cocobolo topped Q5 bass (probably from around '92)
A vintage Bassstar Fretless with a Mod neck.
A fantastic sounding and playing New Millenium F5 Mad Mix Mandolin (all Carbon fiber except for the bridge, nut, tuners, ferrules and strings.
 #154704  by tcsned
 
you need to post the image online somewhere like Flickr or something and get the URL with the .jpg at the end and past it between the brackets using the "Img" button.

[img]URL_with_.jpg_ending_goes_here[/img]
 #154705  by TI4-1009
 
PaintedMandolin wrote:Can't seem to post images here using the tools of the forum.
Keep getting this message:
Sorry, the board attachment quota has been reached.
forum/viewtopic.php?f=359&t=12940
 #154726  by PaintedMandolin
 
I took it over to Hoeg yesterday and his initial reaction was that it was totally bogus with a counterfeit neck.
He pulled out a similar Mod licensed neck from an Alvarez and we compared them.
The decal on the back of the Alvarez was more detailed and had a patent # on it.

Rich is a good bud and IMHO he makes some of the finest handmade guitars money can buy (though I can't afford any of them).
Meanwhile I'm his neighborhood shmo who brings him fucked up instruments to resurrect so i expect some natural bias to come from him.
In the past he resurrected my Q5 and my fretless Mod...

As far as this Hohner ST Lead guitar goes - I think it's better than he thinks it is but he couldn't help but merciless rib me for how ugly it is.
Turns out there is a hole inside the Hohner Signature plate on the back of the neck that enables neck realignment and I've already it played it through my '72 Twin Reverb and it sounded pretty good.

A lot of good music has been made with crappy lower end guitars.
I'll just be happy to have a new toy to screw around with for a while and if I don't ultimately dig it I can either sell it or donate it to a kid who could really use it.
And Lord knows in SF there are a ton of aspiring rockstars....