My first New Guitar Day at OSG! I have snatched this nice white AV65 at Ishibashi last week and it arrived yesterday. It was ranked as B+ and as far as I can see it's almost perfect, apart from a tiny ding on the upper horn. I was surprised to find that the pickguard still had its plastic wrap on it. I am taking this off for sure.
The guitar came in a completely mint G&G Fender case with all of the case candy, including a Fender leather strap, bridge cover and every imaginable document. The manual is in Japanese, so it looks like the guitar had been originally purchased in Japan. There's also a Fender polishing cloth in a plastic bag, which is still sealed.
There was also an additional sealed bag which had another manual in Spanish (?), a grey Switchcraft cable, a set of Fender flatwounds and the vibrato arm. Not sure about this bag. Did the cable came standard with AV65s or is it something the store or the previous owner added? Also the vibrato arm is angled weirdly (check the photo below). It does fit and stay in place though, so I guess I will probably have some bending to do.
All in all, the guitar sounds and plays amazing out of the box, and intonates really well. I did notice that the neck is somewhat misaligned, you can see it in the neck pocket, and the outer strings (1st and 6th) need to sit closer to the side of the bridge posts (?) for the correct alignment on the fretboard, but it looks like it should be an easy adjustment for my luthier. Makes sense?
The guitar is also quite light, compared to my AVII 66 Jazzmaster. I was also planning to swap the pickups, as I have an Iolas set from Sunday Handwound lying around, but I might wait with this because surprisingly the pickups sound great to me. As we have already addressed in the SHW thread, it may be due to the production variation or something. I did not care much about the stock pickups in my AVII JM, so swapped them. So I guess I will need to play for a few weeks to be sure that it's not just a honeymoon period impressions.
