Looks like I'm going to break a few hearts here when the purple goes...sorry! It looks a lot better in the pics than in the flesh, is all I can say.
Anyway, on with the tear-down; the easy bit!
One battery cavity - once upon a time this appears to have had some kind of had some kind of 1-switch, 2-knob effect.
Guard off:
Something tells me that's not the original jack...
Must have been quite a circuit board to need that much open-cast mining:
The usual screw hole split to repair:
Any information on the pickups gratefully received - I know nothing about markings etc.. Also, is that pickup foam original?
Holy moly...shouldn't be too difficult to repair with the right donor material.
Channeling J Mascis! Weirdly, the only other vintage JM part I have in the workshop is this '59 gold guard with the same drill problem
I desoldered where it had been resoldered before, and pulled out the glazing triangles and pins:
Again, any info on the shield markings? Presume that's just a brand name ("...LOLAD 2024", and something like a crayoned "g"?
Guard screwed down and upside down covers inserted to keep it's shape. It's shrunk about 1/4" over the length - I've seen much worse.
Here's where I started to panic. The base of the heel had some weird scratching, which made me start to worry a bit about the extent of its problems...I started to worry it had been shaved off a little, perhaps to make a slight angle instead of shimming.
Then I started to think the heel looked a bit shallow, and started to imagine that lower tide mark was once the guard line, 5mm below where it now sat...had someone taken that much off the bottom of the heel?
Then I got the calipers out and really started to panic that I'd been sold a proper goose - that's a full 1/4" thinner than it should be
I checked a few places further down the neck, and they were all around 16-17mm - way thinner than it should be. All kinds of terrible repair scenarios went through my mind - how the hell could I convincingly build that back up with new maple?? In full panic mode I pulled out the only other vintage neck I have knocking around - from a late 60s Mustang, soon to grace the stripy Jag I'm on with. It seemed loads thicker...
Then...I took a grip of my senses and measured again, taking a deep breath and zeroing the calipers properly...lo and behold, a hair's breadth off the proper 1".
![facepalm :fp:](./images/smilies/fp.gif)
Idiot.
Panic over, I removed the thimbles using rawlplugs:
The second one kept slipping, so I heated it up with my gas soldering iron, and it slipped out just fine:
No secret messages in the neck pocket, unfortunately:
Cavity looks yellowy where there had been some tape during the refin, but no trace of burst, which is the original finish I was expecting. Under the thimbles, though (which haven't been out since the factory, as far as I can tell), there's a creamy white, so I think this must have been Oly white originally. That would make sense, yes?
All done for now. Didn't have the guts to unscrew the tuners today (no joy in snapping any of those screws), but will probably need to clean them at some point.
And this is where things are heading, I think - I spent a long time in the dressing room and my flat out favourite seems to be a straight CFM:
Any extra info on any of the markings etc. greatly appreciated.