In todays economy when most of us have to watch what we spend a lot more carefully and make due with what we have, at least for now, I have put off buying that Sadowsky I've been staring at for months and make my own version. With a used 2007 Fender Deluxe USA 5 (amber body) $1000 and in pristine condition from a very nice guy on Ebay, I removed the stock Fender pre and pups and replaced them with a Sadowsky VTC pre ($250) and Sadowsky hum-canceling split coil pick-ups ($160), lined all the cavities with copper foil tape and 'viola', a Fendowsky. The only tricky part was carefully removing the coils from the Sadowsky shells which were hot glued into them. The poles were just a smidge shy of fitting into the Fender shells however with a 1/4" drill bit I widened only 3 of the 5 holes and a perfect fit was achieved. Strings lined up very well between the poles of the new pups. Under the Sadowsky pups were 2 magnets which I think are there to reverse the magnetic field to make them truly hum-canceling. I use D'Addario EXL 170 strings on it. I must say the bass certainly sounds and responds much better than the original Fender set-up. Hard to tell the difference between this and the $$$ Sadowsky 5'er I was playing at my local music store. I'm very happy with the result. Not taking anything away from Roger and his very well built line, I think it's as close as I'll get to actually owning one. Total cost $1410. Has anyone else out there tried this? I'm sure you have...
stay tuned, I'll see what I can do...LOL
