Today I had the chance to work on a Peavey Raptor 1 guitar. It is a cool little strat clone that needed some love.
When the guitar came to me, the strings were jacked up off the fretboard like crazy! It was really difficult to play this guitar. No fear, I was able to get this guitar playing perfect!
First thing I did was take off the old strings and clean up the guitar. The guitar had a lot of grime on it. The frets were severely oxidised and needed some elbow grease to get looking shiny again! After polishing up the frets and giving the guitar a good wipe down and fingerboard oiling, I put on a new set of Ernie Ball Super Slinky 9-42 gauge strings.
The major issue with this instrument was the truss rod. The neck was severely forward bowed, or concave. This caused the action in the middle frets to be super high! I went ahead and adjusted the truss rod into spec and that helped a ton with getting the action right. The guitar now needed it’s bridge action adjusted.
I adjusted the action at the bridge down to about 3.5/64ths of an inch at the treble side and 4/64th of an inch at the bass side. This is a super comfortable action to play with.
I did notice fret buzz when fretting the 1st fret and the 12th fret only on the low E string. The frets were well seated in these areas, so I knew I had to just be a bit high overall. I leveled out these two areas (2nd fret and 13th fret) and then the buzzing was gone. A quick crown and polish in those two areas took away the file marks and now works perfectly!
I then intonated the guitar and it was off to the customer.
This setup was done same day, in only 3 hrs of the guitar being dropped off! The customer needed the guitar back soon after due to a rehearsal later in the evening. You won’t get this service anywhere else!
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