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Last summer I found a parts guitar on Craig’s List that had an 80s BCR gunslinger neck matched up with a Charvel body. The prior owner told me he had used the neck on a couple different guitars and at one point had modified the heel so it would fit on some V shaped body. After I got it, I sent it out to Lee at GMW Guitars to see what he could do with it. Lee ended up repairing the heel, cleaning up the neck and fingerboard and refinishing the headstock. Since 80s gunslinger bodies are difficult to find, I ended up having GMW build me an alder gunslinger body and used an Original Floyd Rose bridge. The original tuners came with the neck and I was lucky to get NOS BC Rich parts from Lee to finish off the guitar.
Once I knew I had a complete guitar, the hard part was deciding what graphic to put on it. Being a long-time Queensryche fan, I’ve always had this idea of using the Operation: Mindcrime graphic on a guitar. Both the gunslinger and Mindcrime were released in 1988 so I figured it would be a cool idea to put the two together. The graphic seemed like a good fit with the traditional gunslinger specs since many of the gunslingers had a face only graphic with black sides and back. I ended up sketching out the layout of the graphic using the front and back cover Mindcrime album. I worked with one of GMW’s new graphic artists, Jeff Rich at RCA Guitars, who’s been doing a lot of the complex graphics for GMW lately. Jeff was great to work with. We refined the layout and details of the graphic and he pulled it off in killer fashion. I have a bunch of progress pics from the paint process that I’ll try to post up if I can find them (I recently changed jobs and need to find where I saved the files).
So Lee finished the assembly this week and I’m pretty fired up how this one turned out. It’s being shipped now and should be here in a couple days. Kudos to Lee and Jeff for helping bring this one to life! Here’s a few pics for now. More pics and a review to follow.
Speak the word!
Once I knew I had a complete guitar, the hard part was deciding what graphic to put on it. Being a long-time Queensryche fan, I’ve always had this idea of using the Operation: Mindcrime graphic on a guitar. Both the gunslinger and Mindcrime were released in 1988 so I figured it would be a cool idea to put the two together. The graphic seemed like a good fit with the traditional gunslinger specs since many of the gunslingers had a face only graphic with black sides and back. I ended up sketching out the layout of the graphic using the front and back cover Mindcrime album. I worked with one of GMW’s new graphic artists, Jeff Rich at RCA Guitars, who’s been doing a lot of the complex graphics for GMW lately. Jeff was great to work with. We refined the layout and details of the graphic and he pulled it off in killer fashion. I have a bunch of progress pics from the paint process that I’ll try to post up if I can find them (I recently changed jobs and need to find where I saved the files).
So Lee finished the assembly this week and I’m pretty fired up how this one turned out. It’s being shipped now and should be here in a couple days. Kudos to Lee and Jeff for helping bring this one to life! Here’s a few pics for now. More pics and a review to follow.
Speak the word!
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