1960s/70s/80s/2019 Jazzmaster-Style Partscaster Electric Guitar

Update: I've added a better video.

I have a lot of parts and trades piling-up lately and some of it is finally getting repurposed for new lives. This mongrel is a mix of some of that loot and I threw it together during off-hours to amuse myself. I can't resist a Jazzmaster vibrato, you know!

At its heart is the nice, '70s-Fender-ish neck off of the Fujigen-made Empro Strat (whose body will be used for a surreal 12-string project). The body is a recent Squier in basswood and I enlarged the route to "swimming pool" which means that this instrument is actually pretty lightweight for an offset. The vibrato and bridge are newer Mexican-made parts. Unfortunately, there's a teensy chip-out at the neck pocket's finish on the treble side, but it's otherwise pretty clean.

The pickups are oddities -- the main "neck" position is actually the neck/bridge pickups wired in series. These look Jaguar-ish and were originally out of the '60s Vox Super Lynx, though because they're so incredibly icy and treble-bomb-explosive in their normal format, I'd yanked them from the Lynx as they just didn't match the vibe of that guitar. In this capacity, wired together like a humbucker with really wide string coverage, they sound a bit like a Fenderized version of a Gibson Johnny Smith pickup. Do you hear what I mean in the clip? It's a fuller, more practical voice than these used as individual units.

The "bridge" position on the 3-way switch engages the middle-mounted, '80s super-hot twin-rails humbucker. With it backed-off a bit from the strings, this gives a good "jazzy" tone with a bit of a compressed, lows-saturated bite. It'll do lead, for sure, too. 

Switched to "middle," all three pickups are on and that might be the "best" overall voice of the instrument. It's got the clarity and sizzle of the "neck" but with just a little more guts to back it up.

The odd choice of pickguard is due to sour grapes with a pickguard I'd ordered that didn't fit the control cavity's outer edges on this guitar. Instead of using that dud, I traced (and modified) its outline onto a masonite board I've been using for art projects since high school. That's why there are paint streaks (ink or watercolor or acrylic, really) embedded in it. I did fine-sand it, buff it up, and seal it, though -- so it looks a little more lustrous in person.

I swapped the Tele-style string trees that came with the neck for Strat-style ones as they bind less with the whammy. Note my preferred wound-G stringing -- these are 50w-11 gauges and that helps the Vox pickups a bit as they're staggered for wound-G.

The knobs are from an old Kay archtop. They're plastic with a deliciously-shoddy chrome finish.