Late Night Luthiery: Dean ML Bubinga Edition

If you read a few posts back in my blog, you will see the hilarious amount of guitar trades I made.  I was trying to sell a number of guitars, but ended up trading most of them since everyone is heavy in guitars, but poor in cash.  One of the trades I made was for a Dean ML Bubinga.

 

I loved the guitar from the moment I saw it.  It was in perfect condition, with no dings or anything.  The only problem was the pickups sucked.  I mean, they were bad.  So I have made a few changes on the guitar.

The first was to fret dress it.  The frets were awful.  I admittedly tried to get a little ambitious with the action, but it needed fret dressed in the worst way.

Next, I changed the pickups out.  I had quite a time with that.  Here's the short version.

1.  I bought a Gibson 496R/500T set, but the 496R was broken.  That left me with a bridge pickup, but no neck pickup.
2.  I bought a GFS Crunchy Pat, and was happy with it.  However....
3.  I traded a guitar for a number of things, including a Dimarzio Super Distortion. 

So I decided to put the Super D in the neck, and the 500T in the bridge.  Simply put, it is awesome.

But that's not everything.  The one thing that I thought was strange was that the pickup rings were black.  I don't know if I have ever seen a Dean ML with black rings.  They have always been cream.  So I changed them out for cream rings.  This is the final product:

 

 

I tend to play more vintage style humbuckers, so this was a nice change.  I wanted something that Dimebag Darrell would say, "Hell yeah!!!"  This guitar is made to be played loud.  And I will do that.... in the afternoon.  Really I wasn't kidding about the "Late Night Luthiery title."  I'm writing this pretty late at night.  But in the afternoon, I will rock it out.