Some paint nightmares caused by the recent English heatwave mean that this week is suddenly mostly about waiting for repaint jobs to dry. So I figured I’d get cracking on with the Beachcomber. It’s my own design, in as far as any new guitar can be, since pretty much every shape has already been taken. I came to it by trying to morph the two standard single-cutaway designs, the Telecaster and the Les Paul, and then I took a French Curve to the end result. It actually ends up a little bit Jazzmaster-y or Jaguar-y, slightly offset.
This prototype is in mahogany, cut using the tried & tested ‘drill press’ method, followed by a bit of Japanese flush-saw action, before most of the shaping magic happened on the spindle sander. So prototype #1 is ready for routing. Just got to decide what configuration to use on this first one. My choices are:
1.The dual-humbucker, using these aged bronze PAF-style pickups and a Gibson-style hard-tail (I’m definitely using Telecaster control plates, for simplicity & elegance).
2. A Tele-style bridge and pickup, with something else at the neck (most of my Tele’s have humbuckers in the neck, but I’m tempted to go with a P90 for this one).
3. A Tele-style humbucker bridge, with a single humbucker (that’s a Seymour Duncan Vintage Blues in white), which I’ll coil-tap so that the control switch actually does something.
