This is going to sound like heresy. Look, I love Fender amps and guitars. The man was a number one innovator. But I always remember this too - he was an electrical engineer. He was NOT a musician.
He started out with a radio repair shop. This was in the 40’s when the only thing available in consumer electronics were cabinet radios. He’d repair them (usually just replacing a burned out tube) and maybe sell some from his shop. And occasionally touring musicians would bring in PA systems and guitar amplifiers for repair. He’d fix them and eventually he decided 1) these guitar amps were shit and B) he could design and build better guitar amplifiers. So he did. And somewhere along the line, he started building steel and pedal steel guitars. Understand, he couldn’t play them and didn’t really understand all the nuances but he hired someone who did to design them. Leo did the pickup and volume/tone circuit.
The first Fender electric guitars (either Broadcasters or Esquires) were sold as a promotional kit. Buy a new Fender amplifier and for $50 or some amount more, you get a electric guitar kit. Follow the instructions to solder what needed soldering together, bolt what needed bolting together, take it to the shop where you bought it and they’d set the bridge up for string height and intonation for you and probably sell you a strap, a cord, and some picks and you were ready to play.
Surprising everyone, people started going to dealers asking to buy the guitar kits without having to buy another amplifier. So the dealers started calling Fender begging for more guitars and Fender ramped up the production lines and went into the Electric Guitar manufacturing business. Hell, buyers were willing to wait 6 weeks for their Fender guitar. Rather than buy a hollow body Gibson gathering dust on the dealer’s shelf. But that’s another story.
As for the heel neck adjustment, the first Fender electrics had NO truss rod. It never occurred to them that it would need one. No one had ever made one piece maple necks before. As it turned out, after about a year all the guitars they had sold had bowed necks. So they took all their necks off the production line, cut a slot in the back, drilled a hole through the heel into the slot, from the slot through the headstock, inserted a truss rod and appropriate hardware, and filled in the slot with a strip of walnut (the “skunk stripe”), and put a plug in the hole in the headstock. So, what Leo was thinking of was a quick and dirty way to fix the neck problem. Then they had a recall of the bowed necks for the new improved necks. And that’s why any first issue Fenders you come across will NOT have matching neck/body serial numbers/dates.
Of course CNC’s can do that - but typically they are set up to crank out high-volume runs of the same profile, not do pricier one-off shapes, at least in mass production land. As for SS frets - cool; those are one of those issues that folks get all feisty about on guitar boards. “They make the tone brighter and kill strings!!” “no they don’t, and you never have to refret!!” Oy. I haven’t had a guitar with SS fret, so can’t comment.
And yes, fret height is key - for me and for many, though, it comes after deciding whether you like the neck’s carve.
I didn’t know about the guitars starting out as a bonus product, nor about the bowed necks and therefore mismatched serial numbers and dates. Interesting - if you can point me to where you learned that stuff, I would be interested in reading more…
I met Otto very briefly at the film premier, and he is a very nice guy. And he is just cranking away in a corner of an old textile mill in Pawtucket, RI - not exactly a music Mecca.
Yeah, I believe it - only the tippy-top builders really make big $$, based on their wait list, capacity to work and prices. Given how many builders are out there, I am curious how many can treat it as their full-time/only job, and how much they clear as income.
I wish I could give you a cite about the kits. I used to live across the street from a music shop and killed a lot of time reading the various magazines there. I also read about the real story behind the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which is somewhat different from the official or commonly accepted version. But that’s that “another story” I mentioned upthread.
Okay. I can say I’ve read my share of Fender histories and haven’t heard about starting with Kits, but it’s a minor issue. About the only concern I might have is that “kit” seems to suggest that it was a hobbyist’s guitar, like Jobs and Woz starting out with the Apple 1 computer in kit form or something. When Broadcasters/Telecasters and Stratocasters were first introduced they were priced comparably, and even a bit more than with some models, Gibson Les Pauls. So Fender designed for manufacturability, but the guitars were positioned as professional instruments.
I am sure we could compare notes about the origin of the LP - I have a pretty big vintage guitar book library
