This thing was a steal for $25.00

Okay, now picture this, you are a 30-something year old dude with too many guitars at a thrift shop looking for a power supply for a pedal you are building, you come up front with a pair of vintage headphones that would be perfect for your recording setup and the lady at the desk goes "you're a musician? maybe you know of a good price?" - and on the wall hung a pink Chinese P-bass copy, and this - a 2006 Ibanez RG2EX1, with mismatched machine heads totally unoriginal, missing truss rod cover, and missing output jack.

Now, given the condition of the guitar, I told her "Around $50, maybe $75" - I did not plan to buy this....her reply "I'll sell it to you for $25" - well heck, I get another $25.00 fixer upper. They find me, and I bring em' back to life. That said, my previous experiences recently with Ibanez were on a borrowed Ibanez Gio, so my expectations were low, even with a bound fretboard.

Well, I pay my $25 and bring this thing home and am blown away to find out it has a Basswood body like my Jag-Stang, EMG pickups on par with the Selects I have in one of my Kramers, and was a small run "Spot model" for guitar center....but that's not all....

My initial test of the guitar with a pair of alligator clips attached to the loose wire where the output jack was and a set of twelves so old and crusty I felt like I needed a tetanus shot afterward. Despite having shitty action/setup, it actually sounded pretty nice. OF course the electronics stock are very rudimentary - just a pair of 500K pots, a capacitor on the tone pot (of course), 3-way switch, and when it was not being put on life support like some kind of abused puppy so I could hear the machine speak, an output jack.

I took the crusty old .012s and mismatched tuners, half of which appeared to be gold Grover Rotomatics like my Epiphone AJ-18SCE acoustic left the factory with, I don't know what the previous owner was thinking. But like all $25.00 guitars, I have such a stash of spare parts built up over the years, it cost me nothing to fix it up. Had a plastic Jack plate that fit like a glove, a stash of 1/4" phono jacks to use for the output, some wire to wire it all up, all I had to do was lay out $35.00 for a new set of pin-mount Ping sealed tuners for it, which most likely are the same units the guitar shipped with when new. I'm still waiting for some good time to make a new Truss rod cover for it out of ABS Anti-Scratch plastic.

Once fixed up and restrung with a fresh set of Ernie Ball Paradigm .009's, it setup and intonated rather quickly and sounded great. In between here and there I also added a treble bypass capacitor to the volume control to give a hair more versatility. also, I must note, once the Truss Rod was set, and a very tiny fret level was done, the action on this guitar is STUPID low with minimal buzzing, I'm talking lower than a Les Paul Fretless wonder, lower than a $3000 botique guitar....I can see why Steve Vai uses Ibanez, if this is what EVO is like.....needless to say, I was quite shocked a $25.00 guitar could setup like this. I was expecting at least some amount of abuse to be crippling it, nope, it took even less effort than my Jag-Stang or Hondo Paul Dean II to setup and got action just as, if not a hair lower than those two - and I set it up low - my usual setup is around 3/16 of an inch give or take a few microns at the 22nd fret, this is like 2/16ths minus a micron or two......stupid low. Playing chords, single notes, and pretty much anything is effortless, TBH, the action is even a little too low for my taste a bit because it just does not feel right that something I bought so cheap should be able to play that easily. Looking up what these were new, they were a steal at the $200-300 they were new too just based on this fact alone.

Fit and Finish is really good, it had some scratches and a few tiny dents but otherwise is flawless. About all that's left for me to do is finish making a new Truss Rod cover for it. Either way, it's a keeper now, whodathunk buying a pair of vintage Realistic helicopter guy headphones for my home studio would lead me to finding a Unicorn?