Those of you who have been following the saga of my guitar can rest easily. It has all ended and all is well. Here’s the short version of the story:
– Jake builds custom guitar for Mark in 1991
– Mark gets crazy and decides to cannibalize said guitar and blogs about it
– Jake sees Mark’s blog and says “don’t destroy my guitar”
– Mark says “OK, but I already tore it apart”
– Mark puts guitar back together and sells guitar to Jake
– Mark builds new guitar with proceeds from sale
So, now we’re at the happy ending stage. The Savin guitar is back in Savin hands, and my new strat is done and I’m happily jamming on it. Word is still out on whether Mark is crazy.
Some more about my new guitar. It doesn’t have the rock solid stability and preamp of the Savin, and the vintage Warmoth neck will be missed. But, boy, is this thing amazing. I could write for hours on the parts and exactly what I did. It took a ton of research and planning, but not much time to actually do the work of putting it together.
The body is from a USA made Fender Highway One Strat. They are the lowest priced USA Strats you can get, partially because of the hardware and partially because they are not polished. Since I didn’t use any Fender hardware, that didn’t matter. Without the polish, they look pretty dull. The blonde color looks more like a Band-Aid finish than a shiny musical instrument finish. A little elbow grease brought the finish out, though, and now it looks great.
The neck is custom made by Warmoth, who in my opinion make the best guitar necks out there. It has a Pao Ferro fingerboard and jumbo frets and plays like a dream.
The rest of the hardware and pickups are from Callaham. They make all the parts by hand in the US – even the strap buttons – and it shows. The bridge is rock solid, and the custom wound Fralin pickups sound amazing. They wired everything up for me onto my Fender pickguard, so all I had to do was attach the jack and ground everything, and I was ready to rock.
I put it all together with Spertzel locking tuners, and am overjoyed at how it turned out. It is not even carefully setup and it already plays great and can easily get all the classic strat tones, from a biting lead, through the “Sultans of Swing” swonk, to a rich full bodied Hendrix swell.
As a true beliver in Do it Yourself, I think putting this guitar together was quite easy and I think anyone in the market for a high end Fender guitar should think about trying this – you may end up with something really special!
Here’s some photos:
