I picked up another guitar to work on, now that my Raven SG has sold.

What we have here is a well loved Ibanez Stagestar strat copy.
It was an entry level guitar made in 1997, part of Ibanez "Jumpstart" series of guitars.

You can see some major cracks in the finish, remains of the duct tape pickguard and frets that look like someone tried to file them off.

Here's the body with the pickguard removed. Not exactly pretty, and the bridge is , ahem, dirty.

Did I mention the bridge was dirty? Hold on to your cookies!!

The tuners weren't very pretty either.

Ok, I've grossed you all out enough already, suffice it to say, This baby had seen better days. I only paid $60 and was up for a challenge.
Ok, Let's tackle these tuners!

First step is to take them apart.

Then give each part a good cleaning and polish

Some assembly lube

In critical areas

Ready to go back together

There, Good as new!

The jack plate gets the same treatment

Ah, this is better!

Well the bridge turned out nicely.
The bridge plate was so badly pitted I decided to paint it black

The neck had little filler bits under the fret ends, so I elected to notch the
frets to preserve this detail

Complete refret is done

Now we're getting somewhere, complete set of rebuilt tuners installed into their original home

Headstock cleaned up nicely

And the body is currently in primer

Ah, nothing like the smell of fresh paint in the morning!

Well, it's all back together. No strings yet as the clear is still a bit fragile. Final polish will come in a couple of weeks.