This is what's happened:
Originally we were going to go with a lucite body but nowhere around here has lucite offcuts that are big enough at the moment. To get a whole sheet would be up around a grand and, you know, f that for a game of soldiers. So the body it's using is mahogany, although apparently should at some point the materials become available he's going to build me a replacement lucite body.
It's constructed as one single huge hunk of aluminium, from bridge to headstock. The body is then fitted around the guitar. The reverse banjo headstock is kind of weird but having played a couple of his guitars that use it I'm beginning to really like the idea. It's used more than anything because the body is flush with the heel of the neck, so with the tuners pointing up and flush with the sides of the headstock it sits flat in a case.
I want to be able to potentially tour overseas with this guy so I want everything on it to be solid as hell. Having it sit flat like that in a case sits (hurr hurr hurr) just fine with me.
So here's the photos I got on saturday showing how it currently looks:
Shows you how thin the body is. Also the input is in the strap pin. That's kinda cool. That was done because the depth of the body sort of precludes it from being on top, and also to ease the pain of routing heaps of holes in a lucite body, if that eventually happens.
Although I don't have any photos of it yet the neck profile is THICK. It's definitely fuller than my Italia. I'm a bass player and have big gorilla hands so I like pretty fat necks. Think old precisions, rickenbackers, etc. It's definitely around that area, in fact probably has a bit more guts than some of my basses, and a nice rounded C shape.
28" scale and ready to go. The bridge is a badass. The brand. Although conceptually it is too. Gary pretty much insisted on me getting one of these to go on it as he gets boners over the engineering of the saddles. Tuners are sperzel locking ones.
Right now pretty much all it needs are the pickups and a setup and it's good to go. I'm putting P90s in, and have it wired so the centre position with them both on acts like a big humbucker...which is out of phase I think? I dunno I stole the idea from the Johnny Marr jaguar. Talking to http://www.brierleyguitarpickups.com.au/ about getting some P90s wound to put out a little bit more bass than standard, but it looks like he has a pretty huge waiting list at the moment so I'll probably be getting some generic, cheapo ebay ones or something to chuck in there for now as I wanna start playing this guy!
So yeah, that's it. The guy who made it is on facebook here https://www.facebook.com/gse.guitars . He's an absolutely top dude although I guess if you don't live in australia it's probably no good to you. I'm gonna try and convince him to build me an RD shaped bass next. And yeah I'll post more pictures and some mp3s or something when I get my hands on it.
