Cheap NGD

Hey, nothing wrong with an el-cheapo.

Play some Mountain tunes on that sucker, after all, Lesley West rocked Juniors.

 

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I've flipped Maestros after fixing them up.

I currently have the 'upscale' version of what you have, pic below. For a while Samick would start up a new factory in a cheaper neighborhood with cheaper workers, give them the Maestros to start on and when they graduated they got to do Epiphone Specials, and then eventually the higher end Epiphones. By then the factory wanted too much money per unit and Samick would start a new cheap factory and start over again with Maestros.

Weaknesses on the Maestros/Specials:
They often need a fret level, but after the fret level they play like a Custom Shop (if 'your guy' is good).
If the nut is not broken on yours then just fix it in place with a dab of wood glue, those plastic nuts are fine.
Tuners are fine if you are good about 'tuning up' to pitch, but you can throw a set of those $20 'grover' on there and get better performance.
Do swap in full size Bourns or CTS pots and a Switchcraft jack. Make sure the wiring to the jack is a shielded cable to cut noise.

If you swap a couple of pot values and adjust pickup heights you can push the stock pickup tone around. I only swapped the pickup here so I could get a split coil push/pull tone pot in mine. It's a 16kohm that splits to 8kohm. I rotated the screw pole side to get more of a thicker P90 tone out of it, and it performs.

After the mods on mine, this guitar has beat out the Gibsons in the fleet for play hours. It sounds great, is easy to play, and weighs just over half what a typical LP weighs (I'm not at the stage crying about weight yet, but so many Gibson players do and the answer is simple to fix...).

So keep at your modding It will be a useful guitar for you.

 

Looks like my Epiphone that I shoe horned a P-90 into.

 

You know, I don’t think I’d ever seen a white or black single-cutaway LP Jr.-style guitar before now. Both look great! No-frills rock machine.

 

You can pick up a nice bottle of wine and use the cork for a tone and volume knob. Cut the cork in two or buy two bottles.

 

It was pretty easy. Here is the thread where I chronicled the project: https://www.tdpri.com/threads/project-dogear-p90-in-humbucker-route.1050273/

You basically have to chisel out between the humbucker mounting screw holes about 4mm down. I ended up adding a shim/spacer to raise the height (not shown in thread). The added benefit, is that the shim completely covers the humbucker route.

 

I got one of these First Act ME-951 guitars for 50 dollars. Great sounding Humbucker, big/fat neck, 25 1/2 string length and frets are finished fine. Intonation is easy with the Strat type bridge. Body is same size as my Gibson Les Paul Jr/Special double cut guitars.
I love it

 

Epiphone made these in about 2007-08 in Sunburst or Black with P-90 bolt neck. Guitar Center was selling them for 99 dollars back then . P-90 sounds great on these.

 

Nice score. Congratulations.

 

The Maestros and Baldwin are similar to the Fender Starcasters. Cheaper than Epiphone and Squires, but with the parent company name.

I had no problem with the permanent modification since I wanted a P-90 guitar. There is any number of cheap candidates for a single humbucker guitar. I ended up buying a Starcaster to turn into an EVH Frankenstrat replica.

 

Congrats! Love el cheapo!!

 

They were sold at Walmart, Target and other such big stores. Essentially they were something cheap to buy for a kid who wanted to learn guitar. They usually find their way to the back of closets or basements with other abandoned hobbies.

 

I like how some people think these should be priced as a "Real" Gibson.

 

Yep. I remember when these first came out around 1999 or so and were branded as Gibson with the Maestro either missing or in small print. There was a big stink raised on the old Harmony Central boards about some people selling them as real Gibsons at real Gibson prices on EBay.