Oh yes, the Frankenstein relic in black! First thing I thought when I saw the release was: brilliant! Because without the stripes, it's stilll a cool home made style guitar but without the obvious expectation that you'll play all your EvH vocabulary with it.....the guitar itself is great; light (I have 2 of them and one is 2985 gr and the other 3150 gr),very resonant, excellent fretwork etc. but it needs a complete setup before it is where I personally like it to be: the toplock is shimmed and therefore sits too high off the fretboard so that had to go, the bridgepickup is too high off of the strings so that needed to be raised and the laquer itself needs curing since you hear the floyd rose sticking to it once you grab the bar (the frankie guitars have this too).......it plays wonderfully. I can set up the action to a very low 1 mm between the 12th fret and the high e-string and around 1.3 mm at the same position for the low e-string. Intonation wasn't too bad but I always intonate at both the 12th and 19th position so a little tweak here and there was appropriate. I always perform a couple of mods to these series of guitars: I install a fat brass sustain block to further increase resonance, sustain and fatness (the orginal € 25.000,- replica also has this block) and I activate the neck pickup through exchanging the volume control for a push-push potentiometer (A500K value is what's in it). That so called "dummy" pickup is actually a real one and with 7.15 K of windings, it matches the bridge pickup very nicely. You'll have to raise this pickup using some foam along with new, longer, screws. The result is a way more flexible guitar without any obvious visual alterations to it. All in all very happy with these 2 new friends!
