Here's a custom build for a customer inspired by Ry Cooder's '60s Stratocaster with a Lollar lap steel pickup in the bridge position. The neck pickup is my own P90 with A5 slug magnets instead of bars. The body is African mahogany without the arm and back contours, the neck is quartersawn pao ferro, and the 12" radius fretboard is Macassar ebony with stainless steel frets.
In order to get the pickups to work together in the middle position, I took a $265 chance and took apart the Lollar to reverse the phase of one of the coils. This guitar sounds huge.
For hardware it has a Mastery bridge and Bigsby equipped with a B-Blender.
The tuners are standard vintage style Fender.
I realized after starting construction that I should probably chronicle this build so here is an incomplete pictorial telling of this guitars story from humble blocks of wood to finished product.
I forgot to mention that the neck was constructed with carbon fiber reinforcement rods. Just in case the quartersawn pao ferro wasn’t stable enough ;)
The first picture below is routing the truss rod and reinforcement rod slots. It’s hard to see pencil marks on the dark wood so I covered it in masking tape.
Here’s some body and pickguard work.
And some finish work...
