While I was trying to figure out what I would do with the 3A, I tore it down with the intent to clean it and figure out what would stay and what would go. The inventory of what I had:

Neck - needed a level and crown and had a chip in the headstock. The original truss rod cover had been lost and replaced with what looked like a cut down Epiphone TRC. The fretboard cleaned up with a rag and some bore oil. Looked OK - worn, sure - but I like that in a nice rosewood board.

Tuners - They were Jackson tuners and in good mechanical shape. They looked about the same age, but four had buttons from later model Gotoh tuners - more Schaller shaped than old-school Gotoh buttons. Not a big deal overall - you can barely notice unless you look hard.

String lock - I had previously only had experience with the Kahler string lock. This was the Jackson model that replaced the Kahler unit in the late 80's. I'll go ahead and say it - these units are shit. Soft pot metal housing and soft screws. No thanks. I thought about ordering up a NOS Kahler string lock - I had done the same for my Model 4 when I aquired it in 2004 - and it had run about $40-$50 for a NOS/new manufacture unit.

Body - Well... here's where it got worse - and never really got too much better; lots of nicks and scratches all over. They used a short Floyd block - 32mm - and instead of getting a 37mm or 42mm - decided it would be easier to gouge out the wood in the spring cavity to allow the springs to move with the trem. Nice. At least they colored the bare wood with a black magic marker or maybe some water colors. Then theres the extra holes for the mini-switches, three additional strap pin holes and pickup ring holes for a regular sized pickup ring.

Pickups - A J-50N and a J-80BC - the logos were missing their white, but were otherwise intact - I've seen these worn down to nearly nothing or scraped off altogether - I guess that was the thing to do back in the day to make them look like EMGs... who knows? They were both working and functional.



Pickup rings - good luck here, right - these things never survived. The bridge pickup ring had been replaced with something else and modified to fit the oversized pickup. The neck pickup ring was original, but was crqcked at the pickup screw - so it didn't have that much longer to live. I had a Budman (fretsonthenet) pickup ring for Jackson pickups as a spare in my box from my Model 4 so I used that in a pinch.

Floyd - Everything old is new again - this thing was a mess; four out of six string lock blocks were cracked, overtightened and spread out in the saddles. This basically meant once I took the strings that it came with off - new strings were not going to go back on without rebuilding it. The bar was also not original - not Floyd either - I don't know what it was from but it was huge!

Knobs and fobs - The strap holders were small chrome jobs, not original; the knobs looked like original Charvel knobs that someone had taken a Brillo pad to in order to scrape the black finish off the knurls... why? And of course, the two mini switches in there. The pots and the super-switch were original units.