On to the third of the Three Amigos. I had picked up this Thinline on a whim and when I got it home, it felt like it had some potential. It was proper left handed so I couldn't play it, so I immediately dropped a RH rosewood neck onto it that i had lying around (rather than spend money on a nut change and I was too impatient and wanted to play it) I had liberated a P90 from an Epiphone Dot that I had over at the office as it was overpowering the stock pickups (it was a sort of Alvin Lee three pickup job that had a P90 in the mid position and a third volume control in the Lucille switch position and the jack moved to the side) So I stuck that on the neck position just to give me some sort of reference point and that guitar started to sing quite nicely. Even acoustically it had a nice airy feel to it and some real potential. This was a guitar worth investing in.
I did a re-wire on it - pretty much a modern Gibson one given the individual control setup, where the Volume controls don't interact , put a Switchcraft in as the selector switch, LH 250ks for the controls, treble bleeds and a couple of back bee caps. I shifted the pickups round and took off the Alan Entwhistle ones (I think this was one of his guitars in the first place and he had given me a real good donor base to work off), not because they were bad, they held their own against a genuine Gibson P90 very very well indeed so they are stored away for future use (the plan was unfolding or in reality starting to unhinge) and dropped a Gibson P100 into the neck mainly because I could (and had a couple) and wanted to mix it up a bit so I could start to cover more ground on each build.
Now this guitar was becoming a real "keeper" and was far from finished but I had got it as far as I could with stuff I had lying around, so I mailed Micheal at Armadillo over in Texas and went for it. The bridge he had built for me for the Squire that kicked this off had added a real zing, so I figured with the airy feel that this one had, it was just one of those things that had to be done. So ordered up a chopped ashtray with a set of saddles, along with some nice chunky barrel knobs and a big fat brass neck plate. This is going to be good.