Intonation out of whack :: 2011 Fender Pawn Shop '51 [7.6 lbs]

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Yikes! The intonation on this Fender Pawn Shop 51 is way out of whack. In the photo above I adjusted the high e to it's proper location. Note that the high e is set roughly at the scale length (25.5"). The rest of the saddles all need to fall behind this one. The player is into jazz so no wonder his chords sounded so out of tune, even for jazz!

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The main reason this ended up on my bench though was for a missing output jack nut.  Since this guitar was made in Japan, the threads on the jack are metric.  I could not find a metric nut in my parts cabinet so we decided to install a much more robust Switchcraft jack along with a serrated washer to help keep it tightly mounted.

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Tuners & feedback :: 2012 Epiphone Casino NA [6.4 lbs]

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A good customer brought his new-to-him Casino in for a little work.  We swapped out the tuners for Grover Sta-Tite open back tuners.  The mounting holes on the back lined up, but I had to play around with the bushings.  Normally with press-in bushing tuners, I keep the original bushing in the headstock and install the new tuners.  The issue was that the Grover tuner posts were a hair too large to fit the bushings.  So you would think that I could just swap out the original bushings for the Grover ones, right?  Nope.  The Grover bushings were too small to stay in the headstock so I had to remove the original bushings, ream out the inside diameter of the bushings and re-install.  Ah the joys of modding import guitars: replacing metric components with mis-matched imperial unit hardware.

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The player was also having feedback issues with the full hollow / P90 design of the Casino.  An inexpensive fix was to stuff black foam inside the f-holes to help reduce the sensitivity of the body.  Oddly enough, the foam I used was from my stash of foam that Stewmac uses to package Waverly tuners.

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