Cut off the strings, covered the exposed pickup coils with blue painters tape, and scraped the entire fingerboard with a new singleedge razor blade, going with the grain. I've done this before with old greasy guitars.
Revealed the beautiful rosewood grain. Removes wear marks in the fingerboard too.
Then I buffed the whole fingerboard and frets with 0000 steel wool, and applied two coats of clear mineral oil, letting it soak in and then wiping down the excess with a paper towel each time. Looks good!
Next I rubbed down the entire back and heel of the neck, everywhere my hand might touch, with 0000 steel wool. Spent a good 15 or 20 minutes doing this.
Then I peeled the painters tape off of the pickups and unscrewed the mounting rings to see what's underneath.
This is what's underneath:
Cleaned it all up, body and neck, and polished the entire guitar.
Then restrung it and played it off and on for the rest of the night through my HDRX 20.
No stickiness! Plays and sounds wonderful.
Great rock guitar. The Dragon 1 is a thick, powerful pickup. Through an overdrive it can do metal, hard rock, blues/rock, pick squeels, pinch harmonics, burning rubber dive bombs, EVH stuff, Jeff Beck stuff, Eric Johnson stuff, ZZ Topp stuff...all that.
Through an overdrive the Dragon 1 bridge pickup is great but a little one dimensional. Not much transparency when the guitar's volume is dimed.
But the neck pickup is like a '59 Gibson paf and 5 position switch gives some nice clean tones too when the overdrive is off. Even when it's on the guitar gets some nice, grainy, semi-clean sounds when I lower the guitar's volume to 5 or so.
I like the extra tones the 5 position rotary gives. Especially the middle setting which sounds like a middle humbucker (if there was one) and the setting between the neck and middle which is one coil of each pickup in parallel.
It's a terrific arena rock guitar but it can do more than that.
It doesn't sound like a Strat or like my Silver Skys. The single coil sounds are always two coils - one from each pickup in parallel. But they're very usable, especially the click next to the neck humbucker selection.
The whammy stays in tune after dive bombs.
I hate restringing with these Phase 1 tuners. Have to learn how they work all over again everytime I change strings. I always screw up the first two strings...but eventually it becomes easy.
I can sure see why someone removed the Phase 1's from my other '97 CE22 and replaced them with regular Schallers.
That guitar returns to tune every time I use the whammy too, so the locking tuners aren't really a must.
All and all I'm very happy. And the stickiness and previous owners gunk and DNA is gone.
