No turning back
Modification of a Rhoads guitar
by Henrik Hjortnaes
A 1986 Fernandes JS-100 Ltd. Ed. Rhoads gets customized by me. This was my first ever major guitar modification and it took a while to complete due to the risky tasks involved. I'm not a luthier, but I think it turned out really great and I learned a lot from doing it.
Here's the Fernandes JS-100 Limited Edition before the modification. All original except for the bead blasted control plate and the chrome OFR
Raw neck and rear routed controls
I love the Jackson Rhoads guitar and have a couple already, but I always wanted to modify a Rhoads to get rid of the face control plate and rear route it. I wanted a cleaner, more simple front layout. Also, I wanted to strip the paint from the back of the neck and oil it to get that special feel. I was tempted to modify one of my Jackson's, but in the end I turned to my old 1986 Fernandes JS-100, which is a very close copy of the first Rhoads guitars, built for Randy Rhoads himself.
ARTICLE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION...
Background on the guitar
I bought this Fernandes back in 1988 from Ken Hammer (Pretty Maids) after they had used it on several videos from their 1987 album Future World. His tech took care of the receipt, while Ken walked around in the room, boasting about this and that. Here's the receipt just for the fun of it; of course his tech misspelled Randy's name on it, haha. I paid $600 for it back then and it's a really nice guitar, very true to the original Jackson Rhoads regarding neck dimensions and wood sorts, as far as I know.
Specs
3-piece laminated hard rock maple neck, set neck construction and bound rosewood fingerboard. Frets are Dunlop 6230 or vintage Fender size, which is very narrow and low action fretwire - just like the early Randy Rhoads guitars Jackson and Mike Shannon built in the early 80's. They too, had 3-piece necks.
The neck pofile is like a huge baseball bat and the body is made of soft maple. Old type wood screws are used for studs (posts) and the guitar had a really crappy licensed tremolo, which I changed to a chrome Floyd Rose Original (taken from my old Kramer FR Sig). The guitar has good intonation and huge tone due to its fat neck!
The Fernandes JS-100 is born with a high gloss brass coated control plate, which I got glass sanded a long time ago; it always had greasy fingers showing all over it. The stock pups are actually very nice sounding, average to low output. I’d say they are copies of PAF. The once Pearl White finish looked like a nicotine stain and had the usual dings and damages.
When I bought it from Ken Hammer, the guitar had a dent in the finish, around the 16th side-fret marker, where the paint had peeled off and that is what got this mod started in the first place. I played it for 16 years like that, but I always wanted to repair that missing paint. It eventually escalated into a complete re-design, full paint strip and new finish.