Joined the bargain DXMG club. This thing needed some work, but turned out amazing!
Found this as a nondescript "Jackson guitar" for 200 bucks, and it turns out it belonged to a bass player who barely touched it. With a mid 98 serial and the jt580 version with the angled fine tuners i'd say it's around 2009-ish, didn't bother checking the neck pocket
So while there were barely any signs of use, the setup was godawful. And the reason for that became obvious on closer inspection, as the bridge posts had collectively decided to leave the guitars body. The bolts were screwed in as low as they would go, but since the posts were sticking out by a cenitmeter the action was still sky high, and in a seemingly desperate attempt to get the action lower they cranked the truss rod to the max and created a massive back bow.... So i pulled the bosts out, applied generous amounts of wood glue/sawdust mixture, and tapped them back into place.
The truss rod isn't the normal allen key type, it's that fender thing with a nut on the end. Never seen that on a jackson before, and it's also a single action truss rod. After scrambling to find a 7mm ring wrench that would fit i fixed the neck relief and with some new strings it now plays beautifully and stays in tune.
Sound wise, i'm not 100% convinced. This guitar has the emg hz h3, and while i think it sounds good in the neck, it just has way too much bass and not enough top end. I have a similarly aged cort kx-otic with emg hz h4 and h4a, and i actually love those, they are so much better suited to a metal guitar. So it's not a case of HZ=bad, it's more like the h3 is just the wrong choice of HZ... I have a set of 89 and 81 in a js32 kelly, i might move those over into this guitar
overall, i'm happy with the deal i got, but i also don't feel like i robbed the guy, cause he clearly didn't know how to identify or fix the issues this guitar has, and if someone who was similarly clueless bought this guitar off him they might have felt like they were sold an absolute lemon...