More Tourette's again, last night I bolted the neck on taped up the body and marked it up to set the bridge up.

The 12 fret to bridge is too long by about 8mm which reminded me of Pab's issue with his previous STA, I did bring it to Adam's attention straight away and then went away to go through all of the possibilities which I will report back to him.

Both of my Teles and my Strat have 21 frets and the length of the fretboard on these three and the STA are the same so I am ignoring fret spacing of the higher frets for now, next step was to compare my Fender pick guard with both the black and white pickguards, identical down to the screw holes, likewise the bridge is identical.

With the Fender pickguard in place the bridge route is pretty much in the correct place give or take maybe 2mm.

All of the above tells me that the intonation lengths should be close to spot on but they aren't and I have no idea of why.

If I bring the bridge as far forward as I can in the route and bring the E1 saddle right forward I have a couple of mm to play with the intonation, given that the rest of the strings are all a little longer than the E1 when intonated I think I can get away with it and if I can't I'll knock 5mm off the heel of the bridge where it contacts the socket to pull it in a bit.

So where is the issue :-
The neck is the same length as a 21 fret Fender neck
The Fender scratch plate mounts in an identical position
The bridge has the same dimensions
With the bridge in the middle of the cavity the nut to 12th fret is 323mm and 12th fret to bridge is 335.

This simply does not compute, if everything is the same dimension as a Fender Strat why is the intonation so far out and how can it be that bad a manufacturing fault when everything is identical to "the real thing"

The stock Strat trem is only for wiggles not dive bombing ( which it can do ) or soaring ( which they won't do happily ) and I only want wiggles for James Wilsey type sounds ( Chris Issac Wicked Game )

I can make it work one way or the other so watch this space.