u/Super_Witty_

It’s basically a Thinline with humbuckers and a Bigsby. I could not find a 1/2 bridge that is made to work with a Bigsby. There are a couple of guys who make them and sell them for hundreds of dollars, and now I know why. I took a normal hardtail half bridge and a Dremel and made something functional. Somebody would have to look pretty closely to see that it is a homemade hack job.

I’ve stopped wiring tone knobs altogether. The one on this guitar is purely decorative. And for live playing, I’m not using the volume knob either. It kills the highs and I hate tone bleed circuits. I got a cheap passive volume pedal. I think it’s dumb to have a $1 pot and tons of extra wire between the pickup and the amp. Volume pedals don’t seem to alter the tone.

This guitar is for my son. I’m going to convert him to my “no more tone knobs” philosophy.

😂

I’m not a luthier. Just a guy who likes to save guitars and puts some together. Like most guitar players, I have friends/family who are guitar players. I started helping them with setups a few years ago, and I’m doing a lot of setups and repairs lately. Not a business; nothing kills the love of a hobby faster than charging for it.

Anyway, this guy wanted me to change out a neck on a brand new Strat, and he just gave me the (brand new) Fender neck.

So obviously, I had to make a guitar. I’ve never owned a guitar with Jazzmaster pickups, and I figured I would f@ck it up, so I got the cheapest Jazzmaster pickups I could find.

$17 each, lol. (FLEOR, on Amazon). The main reason I got these particular pickups was not because of the price (that was part of it), but because they have individual pole pieces that I can adjust. I’ve worked on enough jazzmasters to know that raising and lowering pick up height on those guitars can be kind of a pain when you have tiny screw heads that are drilled into solid wood and the foam is all compressed.

I’m actually shocked at how good these things sound.

But I wanted to blend in a single coil and wire it like a Strat because I’m not a big fan of the “in-between” position that blends to jazzmaster pickups together.

So this was an experiment on a couple of levels. I didn’t want to use a traditional jazz master bridge because I hate those things, and I didn’t want to put a Bigsby on it because the guitar is heavy enough. I wanted to go with the tried and true Strat floating bridge.

I soon figured out why people don’t do this. I was drilling the (Pilot) holes for the bridge pick up when my drill immediately broke through the wood and started sounding like it was tangled up in a spring. That’s mostly because my drillbit was tangled up in a spring. It didn’t occur to me to think about the huge cavity in a Strat that holds the claw and the springs and operates the tremolo.

But I sorted it out, and I’m super happy with all five pickup positions.

You can tell how into a hobby somebody is by how many words they type about it, and I have typed too many. But if you made it this far, here’s the mark of whether a guitar is special or not. My oldest son is a session player (mostly for pedal steel) but he’s also a huge guitar nerd. He played it today and tried to take it home.

The paint job was a joke for my wife, and I don’t think my old, fat, uncool self could ever get away with playing this on stage. But it’s a shockingly stable, resonant thing with a lot of sustain that makes a lot of different tones.

Thanks to anybody who bothered to read this. I left out the part about how the middle pick up was initially electronically out of phase with the rest of the system. I learn something from every guitar. I learned a lot from this one.