I have built more telecasters and Stratocasters than I know of or can count. Recently I built my first Jazzmaster and had an inclination that I wanted and could build a Jaguar.

Over a month period of time I ordered all of the parts as I found them. Most of the parts are true Fender with the origin of manufacture being Mexico. I have to say I learned more about a specific guitar build in one build than I have learned over a long period of time with other guitar model builds.

Here is what I assembled for the build:

I found on Reverb a Fender MIM Jaguar Neck + Hardware from a seller on Reverb. Which included:

• 60's Reissue Jaguar neck
• Fender patent offset tremolo with arm and mounting screws
• Vintage style 7.25" radius grooved bridge, no thimbles
• Vintage style nickel tuning pegs, bushings and mounting screws. String tree not included

Genuine Fender Pure Vintage '65 Jaguar Guitar
Pickups Set - 099-2238-000 from Reverb

Fender Player Jaguar Guitar Body Pickguard Sunburst on eBay

Fender Jaguar Wiring Harness Oiled Caps Color Correct Cloth Wire from 1469MUSIC on eBay

If you are building or upgrading your jaguar, make sure you know what type of routing you have for the wiring. My body has the specific compartments with wiring feed through holes drilled. More modern bodies are one large, routed cavity instead of the individual compartments. How this affects you is determining what wiring harness type you need to order. I ordered a wiring harness that came in three distinct parts that the wires then needed to be fed through the body and soldered to the other components. The wiring harness for the large single cavity comes preassembled and all you do is install it into the body and solder your pickups in.

I have to admit that the wiring of a Jaguar is a little intimidating at first. The design uses points on the body as its common ground interconnecting all of the separate compartments.

My use body looked great but had some issues. The first issue is about half of the screw holes were stripped out after years of screwing in and unscrewing the screws. I ended up having to glue pieces of dowl in over half of the holes with some wood glue before I could get screws to hold.

The next issue is the body no longer had a ground path for the wiring circuit. I ended up taking about an hour and rebuilding this back out. I thought this was going to be easy because the body appeared to have conductive paint in the cavities. It was the least conductive, conductive paint I had ever encountered. Using a multi meter I could place two leads in the same compartment next to each other and not have continuity at all.

I finally placed a screw in each compartment to be the point of ground. I then soldered lugs to the ends of wires and built out my elaborate ground frame.

When I first assembled my wiring harness, I could not make the rhythm or neck pickup work at all in either circuit (both lead or rhythm). I kept thinking it had to be something I had done or not done when connecting the wiring harness.

My problem was that I could not bring myself to believe that it was possible that the new pickup was bad from the factory. It turned out that it was after trouble shooting for a long while. For the sake of this video, I installed a set of pickups I had that was at one time in a Fender Vintage Modified Jaguar. I have sent the Fenders back for a refund and was happy to find a new set of Lollars for a great price that I am going to install at a later time.

Once I installed the neck, I found that I did need a shim installed and installed a .5 degree maple shim and the problem of not being able to lower the string height without bottoming the bridge out was solved.

I went on vacation before this build and caught some sort of flu like bug that is unlike nothing else. I was bed ridden for three days. You can still hear it in my voice, and it took me twice as long to record the voice over for this video.

I was sick while I was building this guitar but oddly enough, I still had fun and look forward to future modifications to this guitar. I am looking forward to installing the Lollar pickups and seeing if I can modify the rhythm circuit to add some more top end, so it is more useful to me.

I may also purchase and install a better bridge and tremolo system.

The Jaguar guitar like the cat is a challenging and beautiful beast. A beast that if you have a struggle with and walk away from victorious you feel quite the accomplishment.