It came in recently and the guitar was made at the end of September of 2023. I spent a half hour trying to get all the orange hairs from the case lining that were connected to the body via static electricity off before taking a good look at the guitar. The first thing I checked was that the trem bar fit and luckily it did. I saw no tooling marks on the binding, the nut was nicely cut, and the frets looked nice and shiny.
But then I noticed marks on the fretboard that went up and down the neck. I'm thinking to myself that they didn't scrape off the excess glue after installing the frets. I think they are minor glue stains that were embellished by the guitar sitting in a warehouse after being built. I'm guessing that the fretboard started drying from the frets inward.
I wanted to change the strings anyway so I cut them off and started applying small amounts of lemon oil to a rag and applying that to the fretboard. Luckily those marks disappeared the fretboard turned dark and almost ebony in color. Here is what the rag looked like after cleaning the fretboard.
ART!
And here is what the fretboard looked like a few hours later.
I almost always end up doing a fret leveling and complete setup to all my guitars because I have pretty strict expectations about how I want them to feel and play, but this is by far the best fretwork I've seen from Fender. Right out of the box, the action is low, there is no buzz, and the frets are polished so nicely that it feels exactly like when I polish frets with micromesh up to 10000 grit. And I am VERY picky with this stuff!
I consider it pure luck that I didn't need to do a setup out of the box since that is a given no matter how nice and expensive a guitar is when shipping from one location to the next. Perhaps once the guitar fully settles in a couple of weeks I'll have to make a neck adjustment.
The nitro is done very well and I don't feel like the neck is too sticky, even being someone that mostly plays on satin necks. The guitar sounds incredible and stays in tune even during heavy use of the trem bar.
Overall, I'm very impressed with this guitar and it looks like Fender stepped up their QC with the Vintage II Series after the outrage I saw during the initial batches. I'm not sure I can even blame Fender for the fretboard being like that since the wood continues drying and shrinking after it is built. These days wood doesn't get a good chance to dry before it's built into a guitar with the way current production is.
I hope this helped someone like me who was worried about quality after seeing the posts and videos from a year ago. Here is a full-body shot to wrap this up.
