No pics yet. I took 'em - just haven't developed them yet. I'm tired. I drove five hours round trip plus an hour's worth of various stops.
Initial report is that it's a damn fine guitar. It's almost my perfect Starfire.
There is barely a mark on it. The previous owner, who is a super nice guy, took very good care of this instrument. Intonation is perfect, he waxed it, the neck is straight, the tuners are all tight, no binding rot, no headstock shrinkage, and aside from some wear on the gold hardware, it could almost pass for new. There is one stripped screw on the bridge pickup ring. It was partially stripped until I got ahold of it. :roll: The frets show some wear, but nothing that I can feel while playing. I polished them up which made a nice improvement. They could probably do with a leveling, but I generally don't do that until I feel or hear an issue while playing.
The pickups are SD-1s. I had some small hope for HB-1s since it's a '94, but I pulled 'em for inspection and they're almost identical to the ones I had in my '97 SFIII. Still worlds better than Fender HBs, but you know how it is when you get excited for the real thing.
The fretboard does appear to be ebony. The neck is 1 11/16" at the nut. Woohoo! It's got the rounded fretboard ends that many people like (I don't really care either way), which was one of the clues that had me hoping for HB1s.
The neck is not mahogany, but I knew this from the pics going in. My other SF4 has a hog neck, so it will be fun A/Bing them. It was set up (perfectly I might add) for 11s. I prefer 10s, and right now they're a little buzzy, but we'll see how it is after a few days of settling. It really came alive with new strings.
The owner told me that it had sat online for a long time without selling. He recently lowered the price, but said he still had 1200+ people view the ad with no takers. Here's the original ad:
http://toronto.kijiji.ca/c-buy-and-sell ... Z266670814
I got it for $1200 US money. No shipping, no paypal. I spent a fun day in the car with my daughter, stopped at Cabellas and Hershey, though not for long, got a great guitar and met some good people. All in all it was a good day.