Rare 1950s Fender Esquire Lives Again - REPAIRS & DEMO!

hey everybody welcome to this week's episode we're going to be doing some restoration work to this really cool and unique 1950s fender guitar the frets have been played into the fretboard so i'm going to do a full refret and show you guys the highlights of that and also the circuit to the forward position here on the switch was missing when i bought the guitar so i'm going to rebuild that and then we'll do a full demo of the guitar and see how it sounds so this is a 1959 fender esquire and what makes this guitar so unique is that it was made in the summer of 59 right when fender transitioned from the maple neck to the rosewood neck on telecasters and stratocasters and this one has a early body date and a low serial number for a rosewood neck so it's definitely a very early one but also this is an esquire and not a telecaster so it only has the bridge pickup now if that were not enough this guitar was also made in a very small window to have a top loader bridge which means the strings come through and they just go to the bridge on this guitar they do not go through the body as you can see there so this is a factory top loader esquire early slab board guitar and i think it's probably one of not very many made and then on top of that actually a cool fact is that jimmy page used a 1959 telecaster on zeppelin one and uh being a huge jimmy page fan it's kind of a cool connection to me so with that let's go ahead and throw this on the workbench and hammer out the frets get some new ones in there and see how it sounds all right so let's get to it my guitar is kind of hanging off the bench here so i could clamp it in place because what i'm going to be doing is hammering the frets out of the side of the fretboard and this is a very careful procedure that has taken me a while to get figured out so i'll show you guys how i do it i'll do a few of these frets and hopefully they come out easily some are easier than than others but uh one trick you can do is to heat these frets up and i'm going to show you guys let's let's uh hopefully do one of these easier ones here and you'll start to see if there's glue underneath the frets it'll start to nearly bubble up but you really don't want to get these too hot because you can damage the the fretboard and then i've got these little punch tools with with different sizes on them and we can go in here and very carefully hopefully try to uh get this wrap to come out sometimes it's easier just to pull it out the side rather than try to hammer it that's what you're left with there and i mean that's pretty much as good as it gets i'm gonna get to the rest of these and then we'll start to uh clean the fret slots out [Music] [Music] all right i'll show you all the results here as you can see at the top of the fretboard these frets came out really easily and it's looking great now in the middle of the board there was just so much fret wear you can see it in the board itself even on the side of the board it's been played into the rosewood so these frets were really stuck in there and i had to pull some of them and you know use some super glue in areas but i think it's going to come out pretty good now i need to prep the fretboard for the new frets which are over here these are just car 50 by 85 and kind of more of a vintage looking fret which is what i wanted for this guitar being as original as it is so let's get to it it's got a little slight back bow in it but we can work with that [Music] [Music] [Music] good [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Applause] so by this point all of the final fret crowning beveling polishing is finished up and i decided to use the nut that came on the guitar i believe it is the original nut to 1959 so it really looks the part and it saves me some time so i added a little rosewood shim to the bottom there and it just fit perfectly final tuning here and then we're going to do a little bit of intonation work and this thing is almost ready to go all right now i just need to wire in the dark circuit on this esquire which was missing when i bought it basically in the forward position here you get a very dark bassy sound from a capacitor and it kind of emulates a neck pickup but it's a little bit unusable so my friend nick sent me some different values of capacitors and whatnot to hopefully get a more usable sound so i'm going to wire this in here real quick and we'll be able to see how it sounds all right we'll see how this works [Music] [Music] ah [Music] ah [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] you know [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] hey everybody i just wanted to uh hop on here and give my final two cents on how this esquire sounded with the the new frets and then the uh the dark circuit added and uh hopefully you guys will drop a comment and let me know your thoughts as well and if you want to help support the channel in the videos best thing you can do is just drop a comment on these videos for the youtube algorithm as they say but anyways the the dark circuit on this thing i was really impressed i think it sounded great and very usable shout out to my friend nick and you can go follow him on his youtube channel as well but thanks to him for the components needed to to build the circuit there and i really liked it also the the middle position on this guitar which is the tone pot engaged uh it's very usable just roll the tone off a little bit and sounds great very very much like a les paul jr and then the the bridge position which is the uh pickup straight to the volume pot is very trebley and uh you got to be careful with that one it'll bite your head off but uh uh i'd love to hear from you guys so drop a comment let me know your favorite pickup position on this one and i'll see you guys in the next video thank you all so much peace

Channel: Matthew Scott

Views: 124,079

Keywords: norman's rare guitars, fender stratocaster, stevie ray Vaughan, joe bonamassa, john mayer, philip sayce, music is win, paul Davids, jared Nichols, robert baker, Jimi hendrix, Chris stapleton, Darrell braum, Rhett schull, Rick beato, mateus asato, Marty music, texas blues alley, Kenny wayne shepherd, Cobain, John frusciante, David Gilmore, Eric Clapton, eric Johnson, rich robinson, trogly, tom bukovac, jimmy page, Led Zeppelin

Id: 2ZYm7Bvy-Xk

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021