Guitar Demo 1964 Fender Duo Sonic Part 2

Part 2:
1964 Fender Duo Sonic. I bought this in Toronto in 1989 in a pawn shop on Queen street at the foot of Yonge Street. At the time there was lots of funky little pawn shops selling all sorts of stuff and this one shop had an entire wall of Dobros and National Resophonic guitars, Teisco solidbodies and, of course, this rather modified Duo Sonic. Not quite as it is today however as 1970's mod guy had been at it!
My first vintage Fender. Someone had committed some terrible outrage on it, stripping the original olympic white finish and applying some awful poopy brown stain that looked like boot polish and replacing the pickup covers with Stratocaster style covers that exposed the pole pieces as well as adding Stratocaster control knobs. Luckily, everything else was intact and the pickups are stamped 1964 in yellow ink as they should be. The pickguard is original as well. I sourced correct pickup covers and knobs but it still was poopy brown™.

I gave the body to Chris Richards of 3R guitars and he stripped the poop off and gave it a correct nitro cellulose re-finish and aged it to be as it would have been through time without the outrage of stripping old finishes that seemed to be a popular pastime in the 1970's.

It turned out rather well!

Note that the middle position with both pickups is not typical for Fender as they are wired in series. You can hear the stronger tone, more akin to a humbucker in this position. With a Telecaster, the sound is more 'jangly' and even brighter than the bridge pickup position sometimes and this is because the normal wiring for a 2 pickup Fender is for them to be wired in parallel. The Duo Sonic was designed and originally sold with the series wiring.

After I did part 1 of this demo, I made a a change to the bridge on this guitar. It had the original bridge saddles on when bought but the saddle adjustment screw of the treble side was a bodged bolt and stuck up beyond the saddle, so I bought Fender Telecaster vintage spec saddles and part 1 features those. They are identical to the original parts but I always intended to improve the stability of tuning, especially being short scale, the tuning stability is critical.
So I bought compensated 1/4" diameter steel saddles from Crazyparts in Germany and hex adjustable grub screws and part 2 features these. It has made a fantastic difference really and I show the new bridge on my website.

Visit my website: https://www.gringopig.com/