Jazzmaster Guitar build/rebuild

Finished.

Bought this one over Christmas, mostly for the parts as it had good bones. MJT body, AllParts neck, Lollar pickups, AVRI vibrato. Seller said it needed a setup but I took that as it will probably need to be disassembled and started over. So that's what I did.

It came with a bunch of extra parts but it was missing a proper bridge, although it came with two and three separate saddles for them. I ended up with a Mustang-style bridge from the Marr Jaguar (I think), 7.25" radius and 52mm string spacing.

k. Here we go.

Shielding. Double checked with a meter, from one end to the other. Left some tails for the guard to join in. Later I added a screw and star ground to connect with the thimbles and vibrato. You can see the new bridge here as well. Fender made with the narrow string spacing and 7.25 radius. The posts are sturdy, larger screws with nylon bushings.

Rewired the guard completely. Cleaned it up and resoldered every point, tightened up the wiring and made it look nice. This just makes the install so much easier.

Pickups, it came with Lollars. The pots are nice as well ,CTS, proper 1 meg where needed. Weatherstripping to help with the height, a solid layer for stability and then a few strips to get easy adjustments and some tilting when it will come to the fine tuning.

Done but not really.

It needs a proper nut and I'll send it out for that at the end of the month.

A couple things that didn't get addressed in the pictures. I raised the neck with a shim in the pocket by 0.55mm flat, then I added some angle. At first I tried 0.75 of a degree but that wasn't enough so I ended up with 0.98 using homemade shims. Give or take some of my rough math, I'll say it has a 1 degree neck tilt.

The other thing was I lightly routed the vibrato cavity. It felt a little tight but besides that the sliding lockout button couldn't sit in the off position. It was tight between the wood body and against the moving parts of the vibrato, grinding pretty much. I opened the space up and now I get good travel down but still get a little binding when I pull way up aggressively. I'm not sure why that is. It isn't the wood touching, my guess is it's the actual vibrato pieces not getting along. I don't see this as a problem long term as I don't use the arm aggressively but I'd like to fix it. Will have to investigate further later on.

For now it plays and sounds pretty good.