Well I’m back from France, my hospitality duties for the year completed, and back to the workbench. I have two actual live orders to complete from scratch, and a couple more of the existing works-in-progress to complete, but I thought I would ease myself in with a refit.
This is a charity shop find, and it was a relative bargain, for a British-built (Westfield) “E2000” SG copy in cherry red. Westfield might be considered an entry-level brand, but they are well-made guitars, especially something like this, with its glued neck, and typically go for around £100-150 in decent condition (I paid a LOT less than that).
The old Korean G&B humbuckers were a bit corroded, and one of them was a little microphonic, so they popped straight out ready to be rewound and cleaned up some other day. Meanwhile, it seemed like a good time to put my ‘Tony Iommi can’t be wrong’ theory to the test, and mounted two Seymour Duncan Phatcat P90 pickups, along with a brand new set of vintage-style locking tuners.
The Phatcats really crank things up, I feel like this would be a fabulous guitar for playing the blues a la The Black Keys or Gary Clark Jr, and the beauty of it is, it’s delightfully cheap. Not that many of us can afford a bespoke, handbuilt-to-order guitar, what with the Cost Of Living Crisis™ – but this perfectly good body coupled with exceptional brand new hardware brings it in at an exceedingly affordable £259. Buy it here.
