Contacted the fella on Craigslist with the custom built B-bender Tele. Going into Vancouver tonight to check it out. Very small chance of me going home without it. Very excited to get working on it, what a beast. First step is replacing the Japanese Squier neck with a custom neck from Warmoth, or maybe something else if I can find a nice neck at the local parts shop. Really been itching to start messing around with a Partscaster and this seems like the perfect candidate to get a head start.

http://i.imgur.com/ogvo4KV.png

Never seen one with the Bender top loaded like that before. Wonder if it will interfere with your picking hand???

Yeah it's certainly a strange looking thing, and that was the first thing I thought too, doesn't look too raised off the body, I'm sure I'll be able to get used to it with practise. Thing is too unique to pass up (and cheap!), however impractical a top loaded B-bender may end up being. I can't even find one with a B-bender like this on Google images.

EDIT: There we go, tracked down a similar one, might be from the same company.
http://vanrosa.myshopify.com/product...r-system-ott-1

Sure looks like it. Biggest advantage obviously is you don't have to hack a bunch of wood out of the body and you could always remove it at a later date if needed.

Looking forward to your review if you end up scoring it.

Hi Guys,

My name is Scott. The bender on this guitar is my design. Found the thread through the referral links on my site. I also used to own the guitar in question. The bender installed is a standard over the top bender, just with vintage style saddles. I put the guitar together to test out vintage saddles and top loading with the bender.

The bender is primarily designed to be a back loader and can be set up as such with either the included modern saddles (graphtech string saver classics) or vintage saddles.

Besides replacing the bridge when I acquired it I also redid the wiring as it was a mess. The new configuration is: 5-way switch, 1 volume, 1 tone, neck-on switch with 500k ohm pots.

Cheers,
Scott

Wow, that was unexpected, nice to meet you Scott, it's great to hear from the designer, I was worried I wouldn't be able to find out a lot of things about this guitar. I'll probably be buying your old guitar this evening, I live in Surrey and gig in the Vancouver metal scene with Crown of Talons, we're playing a show at Funky Winkerbeans on the 22nd if you want to stop by and see your old guitar again, I'll probably be using it on stage if it's not in the shop. I love the look of having the bender over the top, especially with the vintage saddles, do you recommend I reinstall it as a back loader or will it function fine on top? Did you install the pickups as well? What are they? I'm having trouble tracking them down online.

It works well enough as a top loader in standard tuning. The string breakover is about as shallow as it could be and still function, so if you are going for any down tunings there could be some issues. Someone attempted to drill out the holes for back loading before the guitar got to me and did a pretty sloppy job of it (alignment is off). With a drill press and some patience it could be corrected but I opted to leave it as is.

The neck and middle pickups are old Tiesco single coils. Can't post links due to low post count here.

Bridge pickup is a mystery. Its a proper tele bridge pickup but no identifying marks.

Well here it is, in all of its strange, b-bending, 5-way switching, interbreeding junkyard glory. Perhaps the strangest guitar I've ever played and I'm very excited to see what it becomes.

http://i.imgur.com/o48bLuQ.jpg?1

The thing has been sitting in the previous owner's home studio mostly untouched for quite a while and it's really begging for a proper setup. First thing I'll say is it definitely feels like playing an "experiment". The neck appears to be from a Japanese Squier Strat and I imagine it was thrown on only because it was available at the time, not by preference. There's a lot of friction left with this finish and paired with the rosewood fretboard on the other side I'm finding it quite difficult to move around the neck with ease. The action is significantly higher than I'd like and over time the strings have really carved into the 3 brass barrels at the bridge, unfortunately in the wrong positions, so the last 2 strings are further spaced than the rest. Saddle heights seem very oblong, a few strings are raised awkwardly higher than their neighbors. The intonation is probably pretty nasty but I haven't checked. It does stay in tune better than I expected but could still really benefit from a new set of tuners on a new neck, in this condition I'm tuning after every song.

But all of that being said, I drove straight to the guitar store after buying it, walked straight to the amp room, and cranked it through a '65 Deluxe Reverb for almost 45 minutes. I absolutely love this combination of pickups, very clear sound and the Teiscos have such a unique voice, a punchy sort of chirp that really compliments the classic twangy Tele bridge pickup. So fortunately the unique qualities of this beast go far beyond its absurd hardware, it definitely has a voice that is entirely its own, I won't be swapping out these pickups any time soon.

Using the B-bender is going to take some getting used to but I'm already having a hell of a lot of fun with it. It adds a ton of personality to open chords, kind of like the swooning bends in Zeppelin's Rain Song but subtler and more integrated into the root sound of each chord, very excited to start incorporating it into our music. Going to have to track down some lessons on using it with leads, steel guitar style solos on my horizon.

So overall I'm very happy with the purchase and entirely expected it to require some restoration / upgrades, that's primarily the reason I wanted it, it's a fantastic template for building something quite remarkable. I love the B-bender system, I adore the pickup combination and having a 5-way selector, I'll be talking to the local guitar tech this weekend about getting the bridge re-filed for proper string positioning, I'll see if he has any decent necks laying around, if not I'll order a premium custom neck from Warmoth, and I'm replacing the ugly epoxied plastic knobs with standard chrome Telecaster knobs at lunch break today.

The **** you find on Craigslist.

Congrats man! Kudos for stepping out on a limb.

Granted this is Jimmy at his worst, and the sound sucks, but still some nice B-Bender work.

Didn't realize he used a bender on Ten years gone live. I always think of Hot Dog or All of my love for the B bender sound.