I have a soft spot for vintage Selmer Futurama guitars - one of the first mass produced solidbody electrics in europe (production started in 1955 in Blatna, Czechoslovakia) and very advanced design for its time. They aren't very usable in real life, since the wood stability, build quality and electronics aren't very good, but they are certainly beautiful to look at. Today, these guitars fetch premium prices in stock condition on Czech used guitar market (you can get 2300 euros for an early one in good nick for sure, 1200 for abused one). I've always lusted after one of these purely for their looks, preferably a husk or modified one I could swap pickups on and have refretted properly (vintage czechoslovak fret jobs are nothing to write home about and one can often find guitars with wrong fret aligment from 12th fret onwards - completely unusable).
Yesterday was my lucky day. While browsing the classifieds, I found a guy selling Futurama III (the last version of cz made Futurama from about '61 to '63, utilizing 6 in line headstock design which Ibanez borrowed for their Roadstar designs 20 years later)...WHICH WAS CONVERTED INTO A WALL MOUNTED COAT HANGER...for 300 cz crowns (about 12 euros) - these go normally for about 1k euro unmolested. I simply couldn't resist, despite the fuel cost of driving there was actually higher than the thing itself.
apparently, he was told by some "professional luthier" that this guitar is no good and decided to turn it into something useful...a wall mounted coat hanger. oh the horror. He threw all the remaining hardware away and then the drilling orgies begun. There was obviously not much wrong with the guitar before he proceeded with destroying it and it would be perfectly salvagable.
Right now I am researching what to do with it. The basswood body was plained down a lot, but nothing what layer of fresh basswood wouldn't fix according to my luthier. Neck is another story. Dude managed to drill through the truss rod on couple of places
the fretboard is made out of pear-tree wood, which is not very good choice of material to start with (pretty soft, you can scratch it with a fingernail) and my luthier insists on making a new neck for it, since he can't guarantee stability of the neck even with a new trussrod and all holes fixed. I'm still talking him down to try and fix the original neck, since I would love to save most of the guitar (for the sake of fun and stories) and have the "scars" visible to tell the story. Another issue is with hardware available for it - the neck is 40mm at the nut and 50 mm at the heel, with pretty narrow space for a bridge. I don't mind routing since there will be another layer of new wood sandwitched on the original piece, but the original spacing calls for pretty narrow bridge spacing, 50 mm tops (Hofner 173-176 bridge with its E to e spacing of 47mm would probably fit) - any tips for replacement bridge and tailpiece or whole tremolo system would be appreciated.
My vision with it is to have it finished in silver sparkle with matching headstock, three Jag pickups with 5way ala Johnny Marr on pearloid pickguard in the original shape, but I am currently not sure about the tremolo system. Original is basically unobtainable (there is one guy making replicas and he's charging 1200 euros for single unit) and not very functional in the first place (despite it's proto floyd rose looks), some floyd rose or kahler would look cool on it, but there probably isn't any floyd style bridge with this narrow string spacing on the market. Any bridge recommendation for this abomination will be surely appreciated