Pickup fitting and cavity fill/Setup on 1962 Fender Jaguar

Here's a beautiful 1962 Fiesta Red Fender Jaguar that the current owner wanted a replacement pickup fitted into!

A previous owner fitted a new scratchplate and an Ibanez Humbucker into the bridge, along with routing a few grams worth of wood from underneath the scratchplate cavity, possibly to reduce some weight?

God knows why really.

Our customer was able to source an original Jaguar bridge pickup from 1963, but due to the wood routed from the body, the new pickup screws couldn't attach to the body!

We went head and filled the sections required to fit the new pickup, and in it went!

The original controls were a bit crackly and clogged so we also thoroughly cleaned them for optimum sonic capability!

Once the pickup was fitted to the circuit, we went about cleaning the guitar and setting it up properly.

Every other component apart from the bridge was original, along with the wear and tear sustained over the years!

The (at some point) newly fitted bridge was a roller bridge, which was fitted to help the Jaguar's trem system return to pitch more effectively, but unfortunately the roller saddles had seized - meaning that the strings wouldn't return to pitch - which is something else our customer mentioned.

The bridge was thoroughly cleaned and oiled to allow the roller saddles freedom of movement which was exactly all it needed to perform correctly.

Once we placed strings on the guitar, we surveyed everything else - truss rod was too loose, the nut slots were too deep and the bridge height was too low, so we knew what had to happen next.

After addressing all of this, the guitar had a new lease of, sounding and playing as well as you can imagine.

Unfortunately we didn't get a photo of our customer's face when he collected the guitar, but I'll leave it up to your imagination to conjure the image of an overjoyed lucky man to have such a guitar back in his possession in the condition it should be!