My sharp-eyed brother spotted two black electric guitars in a trash bin and saved them for me.

The Behringer Metalien 6-string is shown above, with a missing wah wah bar and a stripped neck torsion nut. Good for parts though.

I installed the pretty Behringer neck with the bad trussrod on my cigar box bass project and saved the potentiometers, wiring harness and output jack for other projects.

The other trash ax was a 3/4 scale Peavey Rockmaster, electric student guitar. These were sold to students with a kit of guitar, amp, cable, strap and book as a starter kit.

Originally it was finished in a pretty gloss black as above, with real rosewood fretboard, 21 frets, 1-piece maple neck with natural unpainted headstock.

But the gloss finish had been sanded to ugly, dull, flat. And with big splotches of primer showing through randomly in some attempt at artificial ‘road-worn relic’ effect.

I had a feeling my flea market $7.50, end-pin, strap holder jack type pickup, shown below, would not work well with a solid wood body: and so it proved.

As soon as I ‘finished’ the ax, and listened to it, I stripped it off for a future acoustic box project.

The pickup has a single tone and single volume control, with black ‘witch hat’ control knobs. [This pickup never made a sound, maybe the reason the guitar was canned.]

My brother had cleaned the instruments pretty well but there was light corrosion on some parts I needed to buff out.

Dismantling it took a half hour. The neck looked great with little fret wear and needed nothing done to it.

I painted it with half a can of Rustoleum Smoke Gray enamel that I’d painted my hoe, my shovel, and a heater floor grate with, a pretty gloss gray.

After using three grades of steel wool on it and much elbow grease, I sprayed the body outside on a saw horse then carried the whole rig inside the garage to avoid flying bugs. It took a few days.

As usual I sprayed a too-heavy coat and had to steel wool scrape the drippy sides and respray, this time in thinner coats.

I sprayed only 2.5 coats and only lightly buffed between coats but it’s pretty smooth and shiny.

Here’s the parts nearly ready for reassembling. This German metal polish is the thing to use for tarnish on metal components, followed by buffing with a cloth drum in a Dremel Moto Tool. Shiny.

The tuners I removed and sprayed liberally with Remington gun oil and let soak overnight in a plastic bag. Followed by wipedown, a quick buff, and reinstallation.

Not all the surface rust could be soaked or buffed out, but OTOH it looks pretty bitchin’ for a trashcan ax.

Very little fret wear compared to the trashed Behringer, not played very much. Few scratches or body dents, neckplate nearly pristine.

One-piece maple neck, rosewood fretboard. Tuners seems to work well.

Genuine Axl $5 flea market strings, approved by the Ersatz Brothers.

A pretty fretboard and neck, the short scale will make it easier to play.

No sound samples on the Peavy short-scale guitar yet because I’ve already stripped out the end-pin strap piezoelectric pickup and am swapping it out in favor of a magnetic pickup.

So there should be sound samples on this one’s next episode.

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