I’m not gonna pick apart your review, it was well done! I have the same model & same color so it was an interesting read for comparisons.
I was in the market for a humbucker (or close) guitar back in October when Sweetwater was blowing them out. Being a fan of offsets it was a no brainer to make the leap, so I grabbed mine for $359.
The build quality is excellent & I agree with what you say about how great the neck is. The frets and fret ends are all perfect on mine. Despite the neck being poly, I don’t find it sticky like I do on a couple other of my guitars. Being that I primarily play Jazzmaster’s, I was quite surprised how light the T-Bird is in comparison. I don’t weigh my guitars, but the weight difference is quite noticeable. No complaints. The pots are very smooth & a joy to use, & are actually useful. No issues with the toggle switch so far.
My issues with the guitar is the grommets around the tuners are loose & need to be glued in place. I plan on doing this the next string change, so no big whoop.
The other issue is with the pickups. I found the E A D strings on the neck position to be muddy. I spent a couple months messing with the pickup height, rotating the orientation, putting the neck in the bridge & vise versa, rotating that orientation, adjusting the pole pieces, removing the E A D pole screws, making amp adjustments, and more. At one point I had it up for trade on CL.
After reading a tip from a Seymour Duncan employee, I put the pickups back to the original configuration & soldered a .047uf cap between the neck lead wire & pot. Putting everything back together I reset the pole screws back to flush with the pickup cover, tuned the guitar up, and started playing. The mud was gone! Not only was it gone, but I was able to bring the neck pickup closer up to the strings. Going by memory the measurement height for the neck pickup is 4/64” on the low E & 3/64” for the high E, 4/64” for both sides for the bridge pickup. This is of course with the strings depressed at the last fret. I find the volume switching between the 2 pickups to be perfect. This height is also to my liking so YMMV. The bridge pickup is a bit thin sounding, however it does not bother me at all, I actually enjoy it.
Needless to say with this mod I’m really digging the guitar & will be keeping it. It’s been set up like this for a month now & I can now actually just pick it up & play without messing with it. This morning I just ordered a Duesenberg Les Trem II for it. I do miss a trem for clean playing & this seems like a far better alternative to the problematic Bigsby. The subtle pitch bends it does seems right up my alley being I love the JM trem. I’ll also be replacing the bridge saddles with roller saddles for tuning stability.
I really hope the pelham blue T-Birds with P90’s get blown out in the near future!