I love my vibrato, rhythm circuits & eccentric pickup rewiring, but I had a big GAS void for a more minimalist offset.
String-through hard tail, all-black hardware & 1-ply matte pickguard, minimal controls and 2 pickups in a big block of wood. Great.
The colour is also amazing, but these pictures don't really capture it accurately. In reality, it has a lot more yellow/gold in it. It's sort of a metalic olive-gold. This shot is pretty close:
Delightfully, the frets & screws have developed a matching patina! Officially, the finish is "pewter" (the colour code is stamped on the neck heel) and it's "supposed" to be a much more neutral silver-grey, for example:
But there's only a slight difference in colour under the pickguard, so it's not the sun that did it. Anyway, I love it. Even the old Fernandes logo looks good.
It's a 25.5-scale neck, the fingerboard is 13" or 14" radius and the action can be set amazingly low. I'm not that picky about neck shapes, but I think this one must be just about right, because I sort of forget the neck's there when playing. The glossy finish is a bit gummy, though.
The bridge humbucker is made by Gotoh & it's quite good, with a bright & crunchy but pinched sound, as I like. It's quite low-output for a humbucker, about 7.7kOhm, and it's not splittable. The neck pickup is alright, just a generic cheap Asian single-coil with a ceramic bar magnet on the bottom.
There's not much information about these on the internet, but it looks like this guitar was made in 1997-8
I have some ideas for mods, but I don't think I want to do anything non-reversible with this one. Anyway, I'm going to keep it as-is for a while.
