Wes Borland's mangled left-handed King V finally became a real Jackson signature guitar
The Limp Bizkit guitarist's road-worn main axe — originally a rejected left-handed custom order, rewired backwards by a tech named Kadaver — is now a production model.
May 29, 2026 · 1 min read
Guitar Radar Editorial · Reviewed by Peter Luha · Published Aug 27, 2026
Credit: Jackson Guitars (official)
Jackson has released a production signature guitar built around Wes Borland's actual main stage instrument, a King V with a strange origin story: it started life as a rejected left-handed custom shop order, got picked up because a previous customer thought its ebony fretboard wasn't dark enough, and was rerouted to play right-handed backwards by a tech Borland calls Kadaver — leaving the guitar with its Jackson headstock logo upside down, now carried over intentionally on the signature version.
The Pro Series Signature Wes Borland King V KV runs a one-piece maple neck-through body with graphite reinforcement, a compound-radius ebony fingerboard with 24 jumbo frets, a Seymour Duncan Invader bridge pickup, and a recessed Floyd Rose 1500 series bridge built to survive Borland's dive bombs. It retails for $1,299.99 and is Borland's first-ever signature instrument despite the King V being his primary guitar for most of Limp Bizkit's history.
Why it matters
It's rare for a signature guitar to replicate an accident this faithfully — the backwards logo, the mismatched history — rather than clean the instrument up into something more conventionally marketable.
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