1964 Fender Jaguar

So I guess I'm on a bit of a roll. Two posts in less than a week. Here's a '64 Jaguar which is going be the second installment in my "Used Cars" series. This model was the Top-of-the-Line guitar in the 1964 Fender catalogue, and I've always wondered if I could build a vintage Fender Jaguar for less than it would cost me to buy one. The answer is yes, but it took me over three years to find all the parts at reasonable prices.

I started off with a '64 body and pickguard that I picked up from the same seller. It had a horrible copper paint job but I was hoping the original finish might still be underneath after I found the typical vintage Sunburst pattern under the painted brass grounding plates.

The tortoise shell pickguard is a wonderful reddish brown colour with a lot of depth, but had several cracks that I reinforced from behind with aluminum tape which also provides shielding for the pickups.

I stripped the body and found all the "factory correct" tooling marks made during production, but no luck finding the original sunburst finish underneath. 

The B width neck is date stamped DEC 1964. It is well worn, but still has the original frets and nut.

The pickups have the short-lived yellow stamped date code and were made by pickup winder CO on Oct 21 '64, too bad they were missing the pickup covers and claws. 

I found a matched set of upper and lower control plates with the factory wiring harnesses still intact and pots dating to the 20th week of 1963. 

Vintage bridge and Patent No. 2,972,923 vibrato and arm.

L-series neck plate with correct 2 inch screws.

At this point I had almost all the vintage correct parts I needed to complete my 1964 Fender Jaguar. The only new parts I used were repro Kluson tuners, aged pickup covers & claws, and a funky toggle switch plate featuring the Wronski mod. It's named after surf guitarist Dave Wronski and made by Paul Rhoney Guitars. It is a stock size Jaguar toggle plate but cut for a Tele switch instead of the three standard slider switches. Similar to the Johnny Marr mod, but it's on a diagonal and requires no alteration of the cavity. 

I decided to finish the guitar in black lacquer just because it goes so well with a tortoise shell pickguard, and to lightly age the body to match the wear on the rest of the parts. The cavities and neck pocket were left unfinished.

Now to install the brass grounding plates, pickups, and rewire it all with correctly coloured cloth push back wire.

1964 Jaguar back on the road again.

1967 Gibson Firebird I Non-Reverse

Well it's only been a year since my last post, better than four years I guess, but the workbench has been quite full. This '67 Firebird is going to be the first installment in my "Used Cars" series. It came in badly broken down and in need of serious repair. 

The good news was that the seller's description stated that the "headstock was in hand."

The two pieces kind of fit together, but the crack in the headstock had been broken and repaired so many times; and was completely full of epoxy and filler, that the headstock was not straight or level.

It also looks like the guitar had been refinished about five times, so the first thing I had to do was get everything back down to bare wood to see what I was dealing with.

The guitar had deep scars on the front and back from previously being stripped with a circular grinding wheel. The front even shows they didn't have time to remove the pickguard so they just stripped around it. The control cavity had the least amount of tampering and it looks like the original colour of the guitar was Frost Blue.

The break goes straight through the serial number and only the first two digits ("00") remain completely visible which puts this one to 1967. 

Gluing the headstock back together was a real clampfest, but there was a lot of surface area to work with and I managed to get everything straight. 

Note the angled clamp on the tapered dowel going through the A String tuner hole. This increases the downward clamping pressure on the surface area of the break.
                                                                                          

Here's the headstock all glued back together and nicely levelled, but there were still several gaps from missing wood that needed to be addressed. So I had to do some surgery and a transplant.

I also added a mahogany veneer to each side of the headstock which required an even bigger and better clampfest than the first one. 

I had to sand for days to get rid of all those circular disc marks and bring the body back into respectable shape.

Now to add some colour. I'm going with the original Frost Blue.

I gave the guitar a lightly aged finish, but left the control cavity as it was to show the original Frost Blue peeking through. Pickups are a matched set of Ernie Ball MM90's that came out of a Music Man Albert Lee model.

1967 Firebird back on the road again.

Now all I needed was something to keep it in. Stay tuned for the resto on the case I found on my neighbours front lawn destined for the trash.