A Very Rare Bird -- One of the Earliest Examples

This super rare guitar weighs just 7.70 lbs. and has a nice, fat nut width of just under 1 11/16 inches and a scale length of 25 1/2 inches. Asymmetrical double cutaway solid alder body pointed at base, one-piece maple neck, and rosewood fretboard with 21 frets and inlaid pearloid block position markers. "Hockey stick" headstock with "Fender Custom" decal. One "bracket" string guide on face of headstock. Three-on-a-side Fender "F" tuners with octagonal metal buttons. Four-bolt neck plate with serial number ("244140") stamped between the top two screws. The end of the neck is stamped "12 AUG 66B." Two powerful black split single-coil pickups with outputs of 10.76k and 11.06k. The underside of each pickup is dated in black ink "8-22-66." Tortoiseshell over three-layer (white/black/white) plastic pickguard with seventeen screws. Two controls (one volume, one tone) and jack socket, all on metal plate adjoining pickguard, plus one four-way rotary selector switch on pickguard. Black plastic ribbed-sided conical-shaped knobs with metal tops. The potentiometers are stamped "137 6631" (CTS August 1966). Fender six-saddle bridge and Fender Vibrato tailpiece. There is a small area of playing wear on the top of the guitar where the player's arm has rested and a few very small surface chips on the edges, but overall, this extremely rare and very early example is most certainly in exceptionally fine (9.00) and totally original condition. Housed in its original shaped black hardshell case with dark blue plush lining (9.25).

This guitar is one of the very first "Customs" to be assembled, with the body, neck, pickups, and controls from leftover Electric XII parts (see below). The neck on this guitar is stamped August 1966, as are the pickups and the pots. The last "Custom" that we had (serial number "260332") was clearly a 1969, with the neck and pickups undated and a thinner nut width of 1 5/8 inches.

"Another shortlived addition to the Fender line, [the Custom] was part of the drive by CBS in the late 1960s to create new models with minimal outlay. Body, neck, pickups and controls were derived from the discontinued Electric Xll, while the Mustang provided a suitable vibrato. The custom was certainly more luxurious than the Swinger…but the unusual styling did not prove popular and production of this curious model was therefore limited" (Tony Bacon and Paul Day, The Fender Book, p. 46).

"Toward the end of the 1960s came firm evidence of CBS wringing every last drop of potential income from unused factory stock that would otherwise have been written off. Two shortlived guitars, the Custom and the Swinger, were assembled from these leftovers, as Babe Simoni recalled later. 'Production was way down, and we had a bunch of Electric XII necks and bodies. They asked if anyone had any ideas on what to do with them before they scrapped them out. That's when I converted them to six-strings and carved the bodies into a different design.' This was the Custom, although originally, according to Simoni, it was called the Maverick (and examples are seen with either name on the headstock). 'First we made those from scrap material, then someone in engineering got the bright idea to make hard tooling for it, and they did tool up and actually produce Customs. Dale Hyatt remembers the headache which the Maverick/Custom concoction caused him and his fellow salesmen. 'It was an abortion. Everybody knew what it was: a way to get rid of stuff. But people out there in the field are smarter than that. The dealers are smarter, they know. The musicians know better. But CBS didn't care, they made 'em and said here, you go sell 'em.' The Swinger was the other 'bitser', made from unused Musicmaster or Bass V bodies mated with unpopular short-scale Mustang necks. Simoni: 'Instead of using the Mustang headstock design, I made it more rounded, like an acoustic's. Then somebody came along and cut the end off -- made it look like a spear. And the body was chopped up and changed a little bit. We never tooled up for them like we did with the Custom.' Both the Maverick/Custom and the Swinger were made in necessarily limited numbers. The Swinger never featured in Fender's literature, while the Custom made the 1970 catalogue and pricelist at $299.50" (Tony Bacon and Paul Day, The Fender Book, pp. 48-49.)