On Guard

My current first guitar is a Fender Custom Shop 2011 Closet Classic Pine Stratocaster Pro. I really love the instrument. The body is fashioned from 100-year-old pine with a distinctive lacquer finish. A great sound and a remarkably resonant instrument.

The guitar has a lightly tinted quartersawn maple neck with a large C shape and vintage-style butt-end truss rod adjustment. The neck is a round-laminated 22-fret maple with 9.5 inch radius and 6100 frets. There are three single coil Master Design pickups with five-way switching and a no-load middle/bridge tone knob.

There is, however, an issue with the single-ply parchment pickguard.

In the photo below, you can see that I have a pencil lightly resting on the pickguard:

If you look towards the bridge assembly you can see that the white parchment has arced in the centre. The next photo shows how far the arc will travel when the pencil flattens the pickguard so that it rests on the guitar body:

The travel is about a quarter of an inch. The arc does not impact the sound or tone of the instrument but it is a bit of a defect in terms of the pickguard.

My good friends at Lauzon Music were very responsive. They really do have a terrific team and if you live in the Ottawa area — or, if you are like me and live within driving distance — I highly recommend them.

I passed Lauzon the photos above and within a couple of hours the folks at the Custom Shop had a new pickguard ready to ship for my instrument.