I just figured I'd show off my current works on buttoning up the Jaguar with it's final bits of parts, all that's left to order is the Claws for the pickups for when the covers come in.
Well, I finally ditched the TOM and installed a stock Jaguar Bridge, what an improvement, the tone has gotten a little thicker, and a little more harmonically rich, and it holds a note when going down on the bar real well now, so far today, even during some pretty heavy tunes, the strings stayed in their slots, no moving whatsoever, and get this, the Allparts bridge I got was almost 100% perfectly intonated out of the box, go figure. I put it on, and almost every string was dead on perfect.
BEFORE
Here's the ABR TOM installed, as you can see, it was angled to get proper intonation, however, this lead to one issue during the rebuild, that was getting the original bridge design to be straight like it should be. Removal was a little tough and required removal of the pickguard, but I got it by prying the grommets very carefully with a flat-blade mini-screwdriver, and then pulling them straight out with some snub nose pilars.
DURING
I marked the centerlines before going in. I noticed the bass side was dead on center where the old hole was, so I got a drill pit, held it up against the thimbles, and found it was dead perfect size to the thimbles, marked the depth with tape on the drill bit (about 3/4 an inch), and drilled it straight down by hand at low speed, being very careful not to get off track.
The Treble side was done like this, since the hole for the TOM attachment was only about a 4th of an inch deep at most, I just left it, did some mild hand-routing with a dremel moto tool, and cleaned it up using the drill, it ended up being just as tight and spot on. Sure it's not perfect, but it's not visible that there's about 0.1cc of missing wood there anyway. The thimbles were lightly hammered in using a dull-as-crap masonary drill bit the same exact width as the post holes to drive them in with. Both are perfectly straight.
THE FINAL RESULT
Lower action, better sustain, warmer tone. How I set it up, is I left the neck as/is with the shim, adjusted the Jaguar bridge up first to where the strings were just a hair off the fretboard at most, and then adjusted the saddles to the pefect height till the buzzing and choking stopped, ending up with about 3-5mm of space between the Low E and the 22nd fret, this thing is as fast as my Jag-Stang now playability wise.
My next part is this, the pickup covers and claws, like this guy did here, except I'm packing dark grey foam around the coils to keep them centered.
