It's been such a pleasure working on this one with you and copacetic!
Also very chuffed to see a Tuffset on there
For those wondering about the design, this is the first one we made this way.
We call it the "Mutineer" - in concept it's basically a Marauder without the bridge/vibrato plate. But there were a couple of alterations we needed to make for that to be possible.
On a normal Marauder, the bridge thimbles holes are at the top-end of the steel bridge plate. We could have just removed the plate, straightened and bevelled the pickguard's bottom edge and called the design good. But that would have the bridge sitting behind the pickguard in a way that looks a bit too Warmoth for my liking!
The Marauder actually doesn't have much of a cutaway on the treble side of the pocket, at least not compared to a JM or Jag. Whilst it's not terrible for fret access, it does give you some flexibility to reposition the neck pocket 'upwards' and bring the bridge along with it. This improves fret access, but it also got the bridge thimbles where we wanted them - intersecting the pickguard more like a JM/Jag.
Moving the pocket like this was something we first did on a 24" scale Marauder, where we needed to move the bridge thimbles even further up the body and leave room for the full Marauder bridge plate behind. So when it came time to design the Mutineer, I kept the pocket in the same location as our 24" scale Marauder, but moved the bridge back 'down' to compensate for the extra 7/8" needed for full scale neck compatibility.
It worked like a charm! The lines of the pickguard drew themselves, and fitted in perfectly with the curves of the control plates.
Now we can use the same control plates (and offer the same plate options - lever switches, rockers, toggles, blanks) across a whole family of Marauder-type models. The Mutineer really unlocks the last customisation frontier, being able to choose whatever bridge routing you want and with a full space to choose any bridge pickup (the Marauder bridge plate cocks up at a slight diagonal angle, meaning large or rectangular pickups have to be placed a bit further from the bridge).
Can't wait for someone to order one with a Floyd Rose!
Cheers all,
Dan
