Univox Ripper tribute

Saw a Univox Ripper inspired guitar on sale at Eastwood Guitars and thought the natural finish looked way cool and so I scooped one up. The setup on this was better than most guitars you buy. No string buzzing, but I still did a little bit of fret leveling just because I'm a perfectionist. Fret ends were perfect. Intonation just required minor adjustment to be perfect.

It's definitely a 3 piece body and on mine, the right side of the body has a bit of darker wood along the seam with the middle section. Most of it is under the pickguard, but a bit jarring in the cutout for the high frets. I looked online at pictures of vintage Rippers and this was common with them too, so I got over it.

The pickups sound good and you can get a good variety of sounds. The tremolo works well and guitar remains more in tune after using it than most tremolos do. It has a pretty thick neck which is true to the original. After 30 minutes of playing, I got used to it. The only place where it hung me up is on some chords where you might be used to using your left thumb to fret the low E string (e.g., an F in the lowest position).

As usual, I can't help myself from tweaking guitars (see my post on modifications to the Eastwood Tiger for radical tweaks). On this one, the Eastwood "don't mess with Fender" headstock shape really bugged me.

So I took out a rasp and smoothed it into a nice curve, sanded it down, used just the hint of a light stain and put some water-based polyurethane over the section I had worked on. It looks much more like the original Univox now.

I was also thinking of adding a Freeway switch to be able to get split coils without ruining the vintage vibe, but when I took apart one of the humbuckers, the 2 wires that are wired together that I would have needed to extend to do coil tapping were too short and I didn't want to risk ruining the pickups. So left it as the 2 wire un-splitable humbuckers setup it comes with. It still gets very unique sounds that differentiate it from a Strat.