Well I figured I should update this post. The guitar arrived on Tuesday. The tracking # finally started to work and it showed the guitar was in customs in Montreal on Dec 31st. From there it only took CP 2 business days to get it to me. It took USPS 10 business days to get to get it from Boston to the border? Anyways....
First impressions.
It was double boxed with lots of protection - trem arm and saddle and truss wrenchs were missing so they are being sent later.
Finish on this guitar is unbelievable. Very glossy and smooth. I few grain imperfections in the wood but looks natural.
Action out of the box was so high you could do the limbo under it. - A quick check showed the truss rod loosened to the point of free wheeling and saddles up as high as they can go. Dave indicated in an email this is done to protect the guitar in shipping. Ok fair enough.
Did a quick truss adjustment and lowered the action and pickups enough to play - neck feels great , vintage staggered pickups sound good , strings couldn't be deader if they tried.
Played it for an hour or so Friday night and decided something was not right here. Lowest I could get the action was 8/64ths(at 12th fret) without some sort of buzzing above the 12th fret.
I also got another weird G string howl going on like my Yamaha and the fact that the bridge pickup like all real strats is not connected to a tone control really annoyed me , think of ear bleeding treble.
Yesterday I decided I was going to mess with this thing to get it right (I hoped)
First thing I did was remove pickguard and did the little mod where you add a jumper to the 5 way switch to use the bottom tone control for both the bridge and middle pickup.
After playing some more with saddles and truss rod I decided to remove the neck and see what was going on. I thought I may need to shim the neck a bit. What I found was the neck pocket was very uneven and the neck was actually sitting on built up urethane along the edge and wasn't even contacting the body flush. Since I wasn't sure what depth dimension was right , the urethane or the wood , I just filed down the urethane so it was flush with the neck pocket wood.
Reassembled and restrung with some 11's ( USA spaced Tremolo but an import spaced backplate - holes don't line up to restring without removing backplate
)and spent a couple of hours or so and got the action to about 6/64th on the bass side and about 5/64ths on the treble side. Set the pickup height to Fenders specs.
So far so good - the howl is gone - not sure what caused that , the strings, the pickup height, the crappy neck fit ?? who know.
It is very playable now and has a real SRV twang to it. If I only I could play some SRV
Of course it was -20 C here last night and this morning there is a little buzz happening again so I will let it sit a bit and maybe have to do some minor fine tuning.
All in all not a bad guitar for $231 US shipped to the door ( no customs or tax at the door either ??)but I can see where someone who doesn't do their own work on their guitars would probably have to budget @ $100 to get a mail order guitar setup properly at the local shop. I'm sure this is the same for GFS,Rondo and every other online guitar seller.
Here are a few pics
). The Douglas is indeed a real neck-through.
