Lunch still needs to happen. But during this Hack Week at my new job I'll be having lunch at the Virginia Inn with the guys from my old job. That place has a wonderful Cobb salad.
As promised last week when I showed off the recently acquired Will Ray Signature in my collection, here's the tail to that tale. I had just closed the deal with Craig on the WR when I received a email from Dean Coy with an offer to take over the guitar shown at the bottom of this post. All of a sudden, there was the potential of an even larger influx of Z-coil ASATs after years of only owning a Buffalo Brother Special Edition Z-2 and this was not the time to stem the tide.
The guitar is one of only 4 Z-12, and the only one with mahogany body. Dean sent it to me in a G&L tweed case but Marjon (my wife) did not like the color combination of the Clear Red and the orange lining. I swapped it with the rolex case of my ASAT Bluesboy Semi-Hollow and both show off much better now.
The body if from a 2005 ASAT Deluxe and, beyond drilling new 4 holes to attach the neck, has not been modified. All hardware on the body is gold, including the 6 ferules on the back for 6 of the 12 strings.
The bridge is a Saddle-Lock bridge but with the saddles as found on the Gotoh GTC-12. This allows you to intonate each of the strings independently. Great improvement! You might notice that the pair of G-strings are interchanged compared to the usual order, about which more later. The guitar has 2 volume controls, no tone controls. The latter are not necessary according to Dean and having played the guitar now quite a bit he is correct. You just dial in the 2 pups and off you go. Means you play most of the time in the center position for the pickup selector of course. And that mini-toggle you a ask? Just there to fill the pre-existing hole!
The pickups are really Z-coil pups but they have been completely housed in a humbucker. Note that any holes for pole piece screws are missing, giving it the appearance of EMGs (at least to me).
The neck is one of 4 produced by G&L in 2004 for Dean's dcskunkworks Z-12 project and has no model decal on the headstock, nor (initially) any holes for tuning machines. This allowed him to play around with the spacing and kind of tuners to use. The machines on the front is a set of LSR B6 Precision Tuners. The nuts on the back of headstock needed to fasten these tuners are hidden by a mounting plate. The machines on the back are your standard variety of black anodized, G&L stamped, closed Schaller tuners. The G-strings are interchanged because the string tuned an octave higher all go to the LSR tuners but in the case of this (very thin) G-string it was not capable of getting it up to pitch. Maybe if you pre-tension them more before locking the strings; I'll do that experiment later. The guitar even has an S/N CLF33119 and was already registered by Dean in the 'One-Off' section.
Have a fun Friday folks!
- Jos
You are definitely on a roll. As a fan of the Z coil look, I'm not sure about the covers in general, but that is one cool cat! Post clips, we need to hear that beauty.
I had that idea bouncing around in my head and am glad to see that someone has done it.
have heard some good things about 
