Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Ibanez RG370DXZ-BK

This Indonesian axe made its debut in 2011, and can be seen on page 26 of the Ibanez 2011 Full Line Catalog. Available colors were BK (Black), CA (Candy Apple), ROM (Roadster Orange Metallic), SLB (Starlight Blue), and WH (White). Sadly, Ibanez ceased production of the RG370DXZ "after 2014."

The guitar featured today is black, and so it's an RG370DXZ-BK.The basswood body is complemented by a 25.5" scale bolt-on 3 piece Wizard III maple neck. The bound rosewood fingerboard sports 24 jumbo frets, a 16" radius; and sharktooth pearloid inlays.

Pickups are an INF3 neck humbucker, INFS3 middle single coil, and INF4 bridge humbucker. I must say that I'm impressed by these pickups. Sweet and full when played clean, these pickups retain their clarity and bite when overdriven. What really takes the cake is that all three pickups' polepieces are height adjustable with a hex key. This means that you can fine tune each pickup's tonal balance and output to suit your needs.

The bridge is a rather rusty double-locking Edge-Zero II tremolo with a ZPS3Fe Zero Point System (see pic below). The ZPS is supposed to, when "correctly" adjusted, help keep the tremolo parallel to the body. This would save a lot of blood, sweat and tears when changing/tuning strings.

Well, as I found out while restringing this guitar with a set of 009s, all the ZPS does is prevent string tension from tilting the tremolo block forwards via a stop bar. This stop bar, however, cannot prevent tremolo spring tension from tilting the tremolo backwards, thereby causing your carefully-tuned strings to go sharp. And I mean really sharp.

In other words, you still have to block the tremolo the old-fashioned way when changing/tuning strings. So much for the ZPS3Fe. I do, however, appreciate the large knurled spring adjustment knob. This knob makes adjusting spring tension really easy. No need to waste time screwing (pun intended) with the spring claw.

The control cavity is adequately shielded with carbon paint and features a simple layout of master volume and tone controls fed by a  5-way blade switch. It's refreshing to see full-sized pots on this guitar. Kudos to Ibanez for ditching those dreadful minis that crap out when you least expect it.

Work done on this guitar included fret leveling/dressing, rust removal and lube job on the tremolo and other mechanical components, electronics check/service; and fretboard degunking/lemon oil treatment. That's about it, enjoy the pics.
 



















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