gringopig's guitars
1965 Fender Jaguar
A Candy Apple Red custom colour Jaguar from early 1965 and a guitar I could not turn away from. These 1965 Fender Jaguars are the best year for them. They ironed out all the grounding issues and made the pickups sound louder and bolder. Great necks too as they have lost the skinny and tapered design of the early '60's.
Custom colour options had become more common in this era and more adventurous colours appeared too: Inca Silver, Shoreline Gold and Sherwood Green for example. Of course, the reds were represented by Dakota Red, Fiesta Red and this colour - Candy Apple Red.
Apparently Leo Fender's personal favourite colour, it can have a few hues depending upon whether the base coat was gold or silver.
This one is particularly lustrous with a dark Brazilian rosewood fingerboard.
It came with an application for a CITES certificate from the seller, my pal Joni at JTKM Studio and he acts as an agent to allow the correct pathway to applying for a CITES certificate.
Now, CITES is the body that regulates the sale, distribution and control of all protected species and Brazilian rosewood also known as Dalbergia nigra is just that with no exceptions.
Joni offers a service to obtain such a license and I took him up on it. Check out his service here:
Click on gallery for larger version
The condition of this one is super!
It has some checking to the headstock and a crude touch up but it's really clean. Frets are vintage small but playable and I did get Bob at GuitaGuitar to do a fret dress as some frets were high and it turned out really well.
I put my last remaining Staytrem bridge, arm and collet on; the latter being a pain to remove involving 2 bits of wood, a vice and a rubber mallet. It just would not come off.
This is the mounting socket for the tremolo arm and involves unscrewing it from the underside of the tremolo baseplate after removing it from the cavity.
Easy you might think. Well, after nearly 60 years of being wobbled, the threads are almost welded together. Nothing my Dad's old vice and mallet couldn't handle though!
I also set it up to my preferences and I am getting good at setting up Jaguars. The trick is to have a decent angle on the neck and for this a 1 degree Stew Mac shim was used and also screwing the mute down to allow full travel but also low enough so the bridge can move with a clear gap between the underside and these mute screws. It's a fiddle but going back and forward you can get the perfect balance.
Also getting the arm low enough so that the string break mechanism works has to be done.
The mechanism is as seen below:
You need to adjust the screw just below the sliding knob in to move the arm down to the body until the slider just pops back freely so you can set a downward arm movement only and therefore protect the tuning against string breakage.
If a string breaks with it moved towards the bridge then all the strings go out of tune whereas with the slider to the back of the body, tuning is preserved.
I did a full length video demo of all of the Jaguars I own and you can see the new one amongst them. I have done a separate video just for it alone below and check out the whole Jaguar Shootout video below and watch in 1080p quality for the full effect.
