A Very Rare Bird…

This super rare guitar weighs 8.10 lbs. Solid alder offset-waist body with pointed base, maple neck, and rosewood fretboard with 21 frets and inlaid pearloid block position markers. With a nut width of just under 1 5/8 inches and a scale length of 25 1/2 inches. Three-on-a-side Fender "F" tuners with octagonal metal buttons. One "bracket" string guide on face of headstock with "Fender Custom" decal. Four-bolt metal neckplate with serial number "260332" stamped between the top two screws. Two powerful black split single-coil pickups with perfectly balanced outputs of 10.42k. Tortoiseshell over three-layer (white/black/white) plastic pickguard with seventeen screws. Two controls (one volume, one tone) and jack socket, both on metal plate adjoining pickguard, plus one four-way rotary selector switch on pickguard. Black plastic ribbed-side conical-shape knobs with metal tops. The potentiometers are stamped "304 6612" (Stackpole March 1966). Fender six-saddle bridge, Fender Vibrato tailpiece. Apart from some surface marks to the body and a few small 'dings' on the sides, and some minimal wear to the back of the neck, this is an extremely clean and original guitar. Housed in a later center-pocket black hardshell case with dark gray plush lining (9.0).

"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"

"Toward the end of the 1960's 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 & Paul Day The Fender Book pp. 46 & 48-49.)