It’s often not quite as straight forward as people think when you get guitars in made up from different parts, even when they’re from the same model of guitar. Take this Tele for example; Mexican body, American neck and hardware. The owner told me it was a bit buzzy and would intonate correctly. When I measured the scale length I found that the bridge saddles were a good 1/4 inch too far back and wouldn’t move forward anymore. The American neck was fitting into the Mexican body wrong, even though it fitted the pocket perfectly OR the American bridge had the saddles in the wrong place… I guess it depends how you look at it.
To solve the issue I had to fit a Gotoh contemporary bridge, which retro fitted into there body perfectly, so I suspect the original bridge had been very similar. Hey presto and the saddles are in the right place and the guitar is intonated.
The frets were very pitted and sometimes this can be a clue that there are some low points on the fretboard, causing the strings to dig in more at certain points. There were some really low points on this guitar but the frets were big and I could level them out, although two of the deepest grooves were too far gone, a re-fret is needed to sort them.
Guitar now plays in tune, the only real issue remaining is that the D and G string could maybe do with a strings tree, when I got the guitar originally some of the strings were going backwards up the tuning machine and leaving it at the top, even with the strings going the right way these two strings aren’t quite as resonant as they should be.
