The ‘Exbird’ is the result of a happy mistake – I was building a Firebird copy and my hand slipped with the jigsaw. As a result I had a straight line where a curve should have been, and I liked it. It turned a copy into something unique – halfway between the curves of a Firebird and the jagged angles of an Explorer (hence ‘Exbird’).
I built two of these prior to Derelict, a battleship green one with white pickguard, two Gretsch Filter’tron pickups and a Bigsby B50 still lives with a friend in Berlin (pictured), and the second got scrapped so I could re-use her hardware.
Derelict’s first and only (as I have retired the template, hence the name) Exbird is a dark mahogany with a white pearl binding to a Seafoam Green front. She sports two black P90 pickups and a black Bigsby-copy tremolo. She’s a work-in-progress that is due to be finished in April 2022.
