Guitar PLEKing (just had this done)

Hi all,
 
I caught PLEKing referred to in another thread and for the past month or so I have been researching this and began looking at luthiers in the US with a PLEK machine. I also wanted to post this to give a massive thank you to Steve Weber, who I called last week after a result of my searching. Steve graciously took the time to talk to me, and I sent him my first guitar that same day.
 
Guitar prior to Steve's work: In 1989, I bought a c.1984 Dean Bel Aire/Hollywood hybrid as my first guitar second hand from a friend. It needed refretting and electronic work, which I did myself. I also had the machine shop install a nut blank, but the material they used was not hard, and was then filed by hand. In 2012, I revisited this guitar as I rarely played it, but considered it a shame, since I had already done work on it. At this time I redid all electronics, refinished it, filled the neck pocket some, and did a brief touchup to the frets/nut. Even with the neck pocket work, I was still forced to shim the neck (killing sustain), and it was still not to my liking. I called Steve as I was mucking with the fret action via shimming and realized that what I was doing would never work.
 
Issues when shipped (and after inspecting by Steve):

1. Truss rod was poorly adjusted (something I never attempted to adjust, and was woefully loose).
2. Neck pocket needed redoing.
3. Fret work - I always had an issue with the 16th fret, which was not seated properly, but Steve said that the work I did had about half of the frets either not seated or bent improperly (I had bent the frets by hand when in college, using a 16" radius sanding block on both the fretboard and frets).
4. Nut - PLEKing would require a new nut anyway, but the one I had was definitely substandard.

What Steve did (in basically a day):

1. Adjusted the truss rod.
2. Redid the neck pocket correctly, and added a shim to the side of the neck to secure it more firmly.
3. Removed/reseated about half of the frets.
4. PLEK'd the guitar - since I had used jumbo (0.110"/0.055") frets, he was able to compound radius the neck on the PLEK machine to give a 13" radius at the nut to 16" radius at the neck joint.
5. Lowered fret action considerably - I had removed my neck shim before shipping, and the fret action went from approx. 3/16" to 3/8" at the 24th fret at the time I shipped it (was unreal)! When PLEK'd, the action was at 0.060" on the low E and 0.040" on the high E, which I never thought possible.
6. New bone nut.
7. Removed the locking mechanism (above the nut) - I had left this in place even though it had never come with the locks, and was an odd size so that I could not replace it or use stock locks. Steve said he had never seen one mounted to the slope of a head stock before, and it was only adding friction and odd angles to some strings, so he removed it to allow the nut to work properly.

About the only vindication I got for myself was my electronic work. I had sent Steve an email about how the pickups functioned; and when I talked to him after he finished PLEKing he said that he was glad I did, because the pickups have incredibly high output (I used the hottest passive pickups I could find in 2012). I got a nice smile when he said the guitar can certainly drive an amp. At least for all of the half-baked work I had done, I got that part right.
 
I wrote the above a couple days ago, and just got the guitar back today (it came home 7 days after shipping it). All I can say is "Wow!" to the difference in the guitar. Significant sustain improvement and incredible fret action. At last this guitar will be my "go to" guitar for everything (finally). Again, I want to give a wholehearted thank you to Steve and definitely recommend him to any of you who have considered getting yours PLEK'd.
 
(I wish I had taken some close up "before" pictures now.)