This guitar came in with its Ibanez Brother. It’s in need of a deep clean, fret polish, restring and a full set up.

The first step in any set up is assessing the guitar, looking at everything going on and seeing if it will need any additional work. I check all the screws, switches, the pots, Jack input and strap buttons. Everything looks good and this guitar is in good shape.

After taking off the strings, I removed the saddles from the bridge to really dig into the deep clean. Dust off the bridge, get to work on removing the hard stains from the body and then work up the fretboard getting a lot of stuck on grime close to the frets.

The next step is to tape up the board and polish off the frets. So while taping the board I’ve noticed that the frets are starting to pit. In the future, it’s going to need fret dress but for now, on with set up. I work through the sandpaper starting with 1500 grit and ending up with 12,000 grit to give that glassy finish.

Next up, reassemble the bridge by resetting the saddles and prepare to finish the set up. For this guitar we’re going with 10-46 fender bullets.

Strings go on, string heights are set at the 12th fret for the 1st and 6th strings and then adjust across the radius of the neck, truss rod adjustments if necessary (in this case there was too much relief! A couple of turns and we got it playing nice at 0.008”) and then bring the strings up to tension. Slowly going through each of the strings and tuning up checking the intonation up the fret board. Make any saddle adjustments to either lengthen or shorten the string to get perfect intonation across the strings and we’re there!

A final touch up to polish the body (and really go to town on the backplate) and just like that, it’s done.