I've sanded down the Marlin a bit more, done some careful work tidying up the extra pickup cavity on the second Westone, but nothing much worth blogging about. A few months ago I bought the body/neck of a Bond Electraglide (if you've never heard of it, click the link - an oddity for sure), which I had intended to write a post about but never got round to it - so more on that later!
This post however, is about a project I have been working on over the last couple of weeks.
A few months ago I picked up the body of an Ibanez S series at the North West Guitar Show - it's a nice looking guitar with a poplar burl top, in good condition so I grabbed it thinking it wouldn't take much effort to fix up. Some further investigation revealed it to be an S670PB, a model made while Ibanez were still making the S series with 22 fret necks (they switched to 24 frets a few years ago to match the majority of their other guitars).
A good view of the thin, tapered S series body profile:
The mahogany body even looks nice from the back:
Having done this research, it became apparent that it would be a bit harder than I had expected to find parts to complete the project. While there are huge numbers of Ibanez parts available on eBay, most of the necks are 24 fret ones, and the few 22 fret necks available tend to be in the US (hence large postage, and probably customs, costs) and not in particularly good condition. Add to that the fact that the S670PB needed the ZR bridge, not one of the more common Edge models - a new ZR bridge is listed on the Ibanez website as ~$400 so I needed to find a second hand one of those too!
Eventually I found someone in the UK selling what I needed - seemingly the neck and all the hardware from a single guitar, so I took my chance and got a deal on buying it all together. The neck is from an S470DX (the DX apparently means "deluxe" in Ibanez-speak) and all the hardware is in their "cosmo black" colour. I love the "wave" inlays on this neck:
The neck needed a little sanding of the heel to fit perfectly, and a little persuasion to screw into place, but it fits very nicely in the end - as does all the rest of the hardware.
The "Zero Point" system of two sets of springs, supposedly giving the bridge more stability:
So all that remains is to put in some electrics; I haven't chosen what pickups to put in yet though. Since I may sell this one once it's complete, I'd be interested to know if anyone out there reading this would be interested in buying it - and having some input into the choice of pickups and the wiring setup! Get in touch if you would like to own this guitar...
