10/26/2021 0 Comments Fender Champ Lap Steel Serial Numbers
One other significant mover in the venture, however, JW Black, was very much on the Fender payroll. Limited edition and with progressive serial number, a unicum.Some understanding of the founding of the Fender Custom Shop makes crucial back-story to the history of the Relic Series, but the venture was very much a thing unto itself in the beginning, and even owed a major part of its initial success to an outside contractor who was never an official Fender employee. Guitar slide from which Leo Fender drew up an idea to build the Broadcaster. They are almost always on either the top of the neck plate (the piece of metal on the back of the guitar near the neck), on the headstock (the top part of the guitar where the strings attach), or close to the body at the bottom of the neck.And as big as pre-aged guitars have become in the guitar world of today, it’s amazing to note that according to the two prime movers in the creation of Fender’s original Relics – JW Black and Vince Cunetto – the story of how it all came about has never been told fully, or accurately.“Then in 1983 I converted a 50s Les Paul Junior to a ’59 Les Paul Standard by adding a maple cap, inlays, and painting it in faded, aged colour. And bit by bit along the way, Black’s path intersected with the notion of pre-aging a guitar.“In 1982 Scott Baxendale showed me a 1952 Telecaster that he had refinished and aged the body to look era-correct,” he tells us. In 1986, Black moved to New York City to work for Roger Sadowsky, and also moonlighted at Rudy’s Music, where John Suhr headed the repair and building side of the operation.
Then I started finishing them. Black holds Nocaster Relic serial #10 and Page has Stratocaster Relic serial number 100“I’d borrow Telecasters from Jim and I’d machine pin-router templates, and I’d buy the wood and I’d take it to a company that had a nice old pin-routing machine, and I started making Tele bodies. I got hit with the bug to have a vintage Telecaster of my own, but I couldn’t afford any of the ones I was trading myself, so I started farting around with trying to age guitars in the mid-80s – doing a lot of research into Teles and blueprinting them.”JW Black (left) and fellow former Master Builder John Page with some of their early Fender Custom Shop creations. From there, the Custom Shop occasionally applied a little ageing treatment as a one-off for artists who needed that look, but it wouldn’t be a standard line until Vince Cunetto came into the picture.Cunetto was able to accurately recreate the classic Custom Colour finishes before Fender worked with DuPont to colour match the original vintage huesCunetto describes himself as having been, “One of those kids who always liked to take things apart,” and although he had never worked full time as a guitar maker – he was in fact well employed in the broadcast side of the advertising industry when he and JW Black first bumped into each other – he’d already had a long and deep passion for creating vintage-style electric guitars by the time the seeds of Fender’s Relic project were planted.“I started trading, buying and selling vintage guitars on the side in about 1984 or ’85 – I was living in Kansas City, Missouri, at the time,” Cunetto tells us, “And Jim Colclasure and I became friends. Still, he had no call to put it into practice with Fender until a couple years later, when an artist requested that he do precisely that.The fact that Don Was was recording the Stones when the idea first took hold at the Custom Shop is just coincidence. Fender Champ Lap Steel S How To Get ThemWhat if we did a whole guitar?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’ve been doing them for a long time!’” They would need to get the idea past the powers that be at Fender and the Custom Shop, and they would need to assess the market interest for such guitars, but Cunetto felt that if people were buying distressed leather jackets and stonewashed jeans and antiqued furniture, why not distressed guitars?Black recalls: “Vince sent John and I an aged 60s-style Strat in gold metallic finish. And J was like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of cool. And that’s how it went for a time, in bits and pieces… until the vintage-replica master and the Master Builder jointly realized that they could apply this thinking to a much grander scheme.“My recollection,” says Cunetto, “Is that it started off with that pickguard. I was talking to J one time – after he started working for Fender – and he said, ‘So here’s the scoop: we know you’re the guy making these decals, and it’s not cool, but if you quit doing that and you make them for the Custom Shop the way you made them for everybody else, it will be cool!’”This was Cunetto’s first foray into contract work for the Fender Custom Shop, making period-correct logo decals for one-offs and short runs, and he also supplied aged parts on occasion, such as a distressed Bakelite pickguard, which Black had used to restore Ron Wood’s vintage blackguard Telecaster. “So I was doing that and kind of selling them at guitar shows, and it got out that I was the guy making them. “Jim brought J to my house – I’d been making vintage Tele pickguards, and whole Telecasters and all this obsessive stuff,” recalls Cunetto.“J said, ‘Wow, that’s cool! What are you doing here?’ So we got to know each other, and we stayed in touch.” To make his replicas complete, however, Cunetto needed the name on the headstock, and with his experience in the advertising world and inside connections to the art department, he knew how to get them.“I figured out the process of duplicating decals from actual photographs, getting them scaled correctly, and making these really dead-nuts decals,” Cunneto tells us. Black and Page selected one Nocaster and one Mary Kaye Strat, and Page made up steel stamps to emboss the word ‘Relic’ inside the bodies and the Custom Shop logo on the backs of the headstocks, “to prevent counterfeit or confusion in the public,” as Black puts it.“By the time we did the NAMM samples,” says Cunetto, “we knew we were going to do it. By December of 1994 Cunetto had completed “five or six” acceptable prototypes displaying different levels of wear. We decided to use Vince to make a couple of prototypes for the NAMM Show: a 1950s Nocaster in aged Butterscotch Blonde, and an aged ’57 Stratocaster in Two-tone Sunburst.” But, as Cunetto recalls being told by Black, Page insisted, “Don’t tell anybody! Do it under the radar, don’t tell anyone in Fender management, and we’ll keep it in the Custom Shop.” Cloak and daggerTo facilitate the prototyping, Black shipped boxes of Fender bodies, necks and parts from California to Cunetto in Colorado, which Cunetto would finish and age and return.At some point, Black and Page decided the Sunburst Strat wasn’t working, and opted to make it a pair of blondes, changing the ’57 prototype to a Mary Kaye with gold hardware. It was very convincing, and was on the cusp of being a counterfeit. Change the icon for my internet shortcut on mac el capitan“He looked at , and he was like, ‘Hell yeah, we’re going to do this! Who wouldn’t want to play this? You could take this guitar at any time on any stage and put it in somebody’s hand, and they’d say, ‘Yeah, I’ll play that!'”The first two Relic prototypes that were exhibited at the Winter NAMM Show in 1995“We initially intend to do the guitars in-house,” Black recalls, “But also during this time we had the threat of no longer being able to spray lacquer at Fender due to EPA restrictions. “He embraced it right away,” Cunetto adds. That was it!”Mike Lewis was head of Fender’s marketing department at the time, and both Black and Cunetto say he was very supportive of the venture. How many do you want?’ And that was it. And I showed up at the NAMM show, because J said, ‘You’re gonna’ want to be here for this!’ And we hung them up, and people were saying, ‘Wow, that’s really cool that you’re paying an homage to your history with these old guitars!’ And the reps were like, ‘Yeah, they’re new guitars. We got those done, and John didn’t tell anybody about it in management and all.He had two glass display cases made up with gold plaques, and all it said on it was ‘50s Relic Nocaster’ and ‘50s Relic Stratocaster’.
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