Naomi
Frank ZNaomi is a mod of a Mercury Stellar Les Paul copy guitar I bought off of eBay. For $200, the Stellar is a surprisingly good quality guitar. It's definitely the best Les Paul copy I've ever played. I used to play an Epiphone Les Paul copy but after getting the Stellar, I sold the Epiphone.
Anyway, I liked the Stellar and I liked the color of the body itself but I thought the hardware colors were horrendous. So I decided to give her a cosmetic adjustment. Below are pictures of her before I started my work. Missing from these pictures are the cream pickguard I removed (I hate Les Paul pickguards) and the original bell knobs (hate those too).
The stock pickups are very good so I reused one of them in Negrita, my modified Squier Tele.
Here are pictures of Naomi under the knife...
And finally, here are pictures of her after the work was done. I decided to go with a blue and gold color scheme so I replaced all the hardware with gold. I couldn't find a gold truss rod cover so I painted the existing one gold. I replaced the pickups with gold Hot LiverPool Retrotron pickups from GuitarFetish. These pickups are searing hot and make it sound even better than they already sounded.
