When GFS recently held a "20% off everything" sale in conjunction with their move from the Boston area to Sarasota FL, I picked up one of their
Xaviere XV840 double-bound Tele style guitars. Already a bargain at a regular price of $179, the guitar was only $143.20 after the 20% discount. I had been looking at
the vintage white version with a maple neck, which I wanted to convert to all black hardware and trim, making a "white tuxedo" Tele. The guitar already had double black binding, which made a good start toward the look I was going for. At the same time, I took further advantage of the 20% off sale by buying a black Tele control plate, knobs, jack plate, pickguard and pickguard mounting screws. In addition to the GFS parts, I also picked up a black Tele bridge plate made by Gotoh at Warmoth, and a black Tele neck pickup cover that I found on Reverb.com.
Good plan, maybe, but execution turned out to be more problematic! While the guitar itself is of amazingly good quality for the price point, making changes to it are not as straightforward as I'd hoped. Some of the changes went smoothly, but I ran into four problems:
- The oval jack plate I bought doesn't fit the guitar, which turns out to have a rectangular plate. Couldn't see that on any of the GFS product page photos, so took my best guess....wrong! No problem, since I'll just exchange it. This was the least of my problems (and the least interesting).
- The black pickguard, cut to vintage Fender Telecaster specs, doesn't fit the Xaviere. It may look identical to a Fender, but the XV840 has some slight dimensional differences and the mounting holes don't line up. I sent an e-mail to GFS asking if they have black pickguards in stock specifically for the XV840, but this is a longshot. I may need to have a custom guard cut for it. That's likely to run me ~$40, maybe more.
- The Gotoh bridge plate is a very high quality piece built to standard Fender Tele specs, but once again, the XV840 is not dimensionally the same. This gave rise to two problems:
- The saddles on the Gotoh unit are located farther toward the bottom of the guitar than the GFS bridge. Consequently, the saddle-length intonation screws have to be backed out very close to the end of their travel to move the saddles up to where they were with the stock bridge plate. I was able to successfully intonate all of the strings except the high E, where I ran out of screw travel. It's very close, but still just a wee bit flat. I can probably live with it, but I'll see if I can locate a slightly longer black screw to get it spot-on.
- The mounting holes for the bridge pickup don't match up with the stock GFS Fat TC Alnico pickup, which are slightly farther apart than the Fender standard. Consequently, the pickup can't be mounted on the Gotoh bridge plate. Fortunately, I had on hand a pickup set that came out of my Squier Classic Vibe '50s Tele, and the bridge pickup fit the Gotoh bridge perfectly.
- While changing the pickup cover on the GFS neck pickup, I somehow managed to damage it so that it no longer works and tests as open (infinite resistance) with my multimeter. I probably managed to break a winding wire somewhere while removing the original chrome cover. I took off the tape wrap and inspected it but couldn't find the problem. In the garbage it went, 100% my fault. But I still had the neck pickup from that same CV '50s Tele, so I installed that after mounting the black pickup cover. Works fine now.
So that's where my "Tuxedo Tele" project currently stands--see photos below. I still need to resolve the pickguard issue, because I REALLY want a black one on the guitar. I also want to install black tuners and string trees, and replace a few remaining chrome mounting screws. Hopefully, those changes go more smoothly!
Lesson learned: The GFS stuff itself is generally pretty good quality, especially for the price, but you can't count on it to be interchangeable with Fender spec parts!
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Tuxedo_Tele_WIP.jpg [ 71.08 KiB | Viewed 7917 times ]
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