Pre Owned ESB4.

Simon did the setup for me today and the instrument is 99% done. We even had a hour or two playing it against some of his guitar collection - including a very rare Les Paul Signature belonging to one of his mates that he's been doing some work on. I'm pleased: the pickups sound pretty reasonable in spite of being at the budget end of the scale and to my mind its a very acceptable instrument. I gave it a set of flatwound Rotosound strings - only brand of flatwounds in the shop at the time, and I think they were a reasonable choice. There's a useful vintage-but-not-too-muddy tone available from the neck pickup in humbucking config which would be hard to get from my Jazz. I didn't get the neck angle exactly right - the action on the bottom string is maybe a couple of tenths of a mm higher than it might be, but its pretty close and the others are OK I reckon.

That's great. Congrats on the new member of the family!

There is something just incredibly satisfying about hearing music coming out of an instrument you made. Glad you like what you built.

If the pickups sound good they are good pickups. Doesn't matter what you paid. I have now had some really good stuff is coming out of Korea and Artec makes pickups for a huge number of OEMs. It stands to reason that some of them would sound pretty good. Electricity doesn't know how much you paid ;-)

Rotosounds take me back ...didn't know that they even made flatwounds. The first set of strings I can remember buying were roundwound Rotosounds. They replaced the flatwounds I had on my Precision, so that I could sound like John Entwistle...which I still dont, BTW.

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I've decided to call it complete, after spending a morning tidying up the binding in the F holes. A bone nut, shaped the way I like (no more than string height and scalloped between strings) would be nice, but I decided I wasn't in the mood for that job. So its in the GOTM for this month.

My daughter has a nice philosophy on this. She says "little flaws remind me that I made it with my own hands." My favorite guitar has lots of places where I can tell someone made it by hand.

Do you happen to know the fretboard radius of your ESB-4?

I don't I'm afraid, and I'm away from home for a while so can't look at it. I don't know if @Simon Barden happened to check while he had it.

All the PB kits should have a 12" radius. IIRC, I levelled the frets on it, so would have used a 12" radius block on them.

An interesting observation on this guitar is that its been hanging on my bookcase for the last couple of years, where it gets plenty of light but almost no direct sun, and I really think that the flame in the top, whilst still rather 'understated' is rather more evident than it was when I had just finished it.

Just begging for a photo, Jim.

Attachment 43239

Maybe I'm imagining it, don't know. Very hard to compare photos really...