1969 Maple Fretboard Esquire

1969 Fender Esquire.

This 'maple' fretboard blond beauty with a solid ash body weighs just 7.70 lbs. One-piece maple neck with a nut width of 1 5/8 inches, a scale length of 25 1/2 inches and a wonderful medium-to-fat profile. Maple fretboard  with 21 original medium-thin frets, black dot position markers and small black dot side-markers. Single "butterfly" string tree. CBS 'Black' headstock decal with "Fender" in black with gold trim, "Esquire" beside it, and two patent numbers "2,573,254  3,143,028" in black below. Individual Fender "F" Tuners with octagonal metal buttons. Four-bolt neck plate with serial number "253155" between the top two screws.One single-coil pickup, angled in bridgeplate, with a very hot output of 7.94k. The pickup is stamped on the underside "3 25 9" (March 25th, 1969). Three-ply (white/black/mother-of-toilet-seat) plastic pickguard with eight screws. Two controls (one volume, one tone) plus three-way "tone" switch with "top-hat" tip, all on metal plate adjoining pickguard. Chrome knobs with flat tops and knurled sides. Telecaster/Esquire combined bridge/tailpiece with three steel saddles. The neck is stamped "3MAY 69B", and the pots are dated "137 6642" (CTS, October 1966). When we acquired this guitar the pickup was not reading correctly so we sent it to our master Luthier, Scott Lentz who has restored the original pickup to its former glory. At the same time Scott changed-out the original nut with a perfect replacement. We believe that the guitar has been expertly re-fretted - there is very little wear to the frets or the fingerboard - but there is some playing wear on the treble-side edge of the neck. Apart from a few small surface wear-marks on the edges, this remarkable example of a rare maple fretboard Esquire is in exceptionally fine (9.00) condition. Housed in its original Fender three-latch, rectangular black hardshell case with black leather ends and dark orange plush lining (9.00).

Maple fretboard Esquires, are in our opinion rather scarce. The Esquire was discontinued from the Fender line in 1970.

The price in July 1968 was $194.50 for the guitar (a full $35.00 less than its Telecaster cousin)... plus a huge $57.50 for the case!

"Leo Fender's new solidbody was the instrument that we know now as the Fender Telecaster, effectively the world's first commercially successful solidbody electric guitar...The guitar was originally named the Fender Esquire and then the Fender Broadcaster, and it first went into production in 1950. It was a simple, effective instrument. It had a basic, single-cutaway, solid slab of ash for a body, with a screwed-on maple neck. Everything was geared to easy production. It had a slanted pickup mounted into a steel bridge-plate carrying three adjustable bridge-saddles, and the body was finished in a yellowish color known as blond. It was unadorned and like nothing else. It was ahead of its time (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of Fender, p. 10).

"After a false start the Esquire re-appeared...in 1951, now with Fender's new adjustable truss-rod. It was offered in single-pickup format only, but otherwise was virtually identical to the two-pickup Telecaster. However, the Esquire's three-way selector functioned as a preset tone control or bypass switch, offering wide versatility from a one-pickup guitar. Perhaps surprisingly, the Esquire stayed in the line for 20 years" (Tony Bacon and Paul Day, The Fender Book, p. 10).