A nice recap!

I'm glad someone knows about me and he sent me a pm.

Hi Vincent,

It's Phil here, if you remember, I sent you a PM asking you if you were Vincent Mah.

Anyway, I've been in this forum for a long time, and so have you. I've always seen you posting, and I've also seen and spoken to you in Maestro Guitars. I bought lots of Lyric HG from you guys.

But, I've never reconciled the Maestro Vincent with Gr3y, until recently.

Anyway, I checked out your website and everything, very impressive. I remember reading and replying in the thread whereby you first started out cutting pickguards. And since then when people ask about customing pickguards, we'll always refer them to Gr3y. Haha, but nowadays I'm hardly active in the SOFT forums anymore. It's just different now, but that's another story altogether.

Anyway, nice to meet you. And, guess what. I'm working for Maestro now, just ORDed not long ago, and while waiting for Uni to start, I got a part time job doing retail. Too bad you've left, it'd have been fun.

Lastly, I'm considering getting you to do some jobs for my guitars! There's just so many ideas, I loved the inlay you did. That could work out great on my guitar. And the respraying of the pedal as well, that's good news. I've a CMATmods Deeelay that I love to death but it looks plain ugly with the matted silver coating.
And the Tree of Life is tempting as well, I've Prestige 1570 that might need some sprucing up.
So tempting, eh.

Well, have fun with whatever you're doing now, and congrats on the album launch!

regards,
Phil

Lion Attack!

Nope it's not another horror scene you'll read on newspaper. Recently i did a nice little modification for someone who have trouble with his floating bridge. The new bridge he fixed on can't do an up wham because of the routed area not big enough. So instead of expanding that routed area, he got me to do a lion claw on it. Lion claw design was originally from Ibanez Jem designed by well known guitarist Steve Vai.




This is how it looks like on a typical Ibanez Jem. Oh yes, that's something i'm working on and you should watch on if you like Ibanez guitars.

To Fret or Not To Fret?

I noticed that my work comes in some fashion. If you've been following my work you'll realize a pattern i'm sure! Hmz. haha. Anyway here's some fret work.

First up, a rosewood fingerboard that's pretty old and worn. Owner wish to get back the feel of jumbo frets instead of jumbo flats. So upon removing all the old frets, i realized the dirty and worn board. Took the initiative to restore it back to glory.




Next up, Remember the black vine of life on a maple board? Yup, i've completed it's fretwork. Sorry to the owner for the delay, my band have quite some activities lately. Anyway dealing with maple is always tricky as they need extra care always. Anything wrong will result in an almost irreversible move. Masking tapes are called upon for this case.

Here's a close up of the fret edges :)

And the neck picture splitting into 4.

Bigsby B5 Installation

I'm glad i got to do this, again. I did it quite a while ago without taking any pictures! Now here comes another piece. This time round, a cij fender tele with a B5 with authentic Fender logo! Now that's cool.

Vine of Life

i have to praise that Steve Vai really created a very nice vine design for fingerboard. Recently i'm working on this "black and white" vine of life. This is not the first time i'm doing such inlay and i'm feeling the blessing from a cnc machine this time! These pieces you see are cnc cut and routed. I used to think CNC are like perfections, i am wrong. These are actually incurately routed on the fingerboard which resulted me doing more routing in order to let the pieces fit in. Nevertheless check out the pictures of the almost complete fingerboard.

Next step, clear coat and fretting! Fyi, this actually belongs to the b/w swirl jem body i've posted earlier on. The fingerboard was originally a normal maple fingerboard with black plastic dots and i swapped a new maple fingerboard on it.

It's all about inlays

Recently i was tasked to do a very special truss rod cover. I'm glad that it made a break through for Gr3y Custom Shop as it was the first time i did such things. So guys and girls! Anything you feel that i can do for you, don't hesitate.

Another great news for Gr3y Custom Shop is that i've managed to reduced the size of inlay i can handle! What does this mean? I'm able to do real small inlays for your sweet guitar :) Recently my friend Errik had his 21st birthday. To get a guitarist a present, it got to be related! Why? Majority will go for t-shirts, chocolates, jewellery etc.. those are plain boring to me. So somehow during a certain morning the thought of doing a real unique inlay for him came into my mind.

This inlay is 1.5cm wide. Made of Gold Mother of pearl and is ready to inlay into any fingerboard.

A New Adventure

So i was called upon to do this very interesting new thing for customizing a guitar. Make a guess.

Materials here are Mahogany and High grade Abalone shell

Remember the "marble" ? Alright, it's not a marble but a swirl jem. I'm glad that i helped in the process of glossing up this babe! Next step? I'm going to help this little monster get entangled in black vines! Keep a look out :D