Call In The Pros
More used to doing our own makeovers in The Mod Squad, we sit back and let the Vintage ProShop do the heavy lifting for our custom build
The Vintage brand celebrated its 25th anniversary back in 2020 and today exports its wide range of inspired-by models worldwide. As the company’s success proves, there are an awful lot of us that buy and play budget instruments.
This writer’s V62 was purchased well over a decade ago from Cash Convertors for around £60. It was one of the early Vintage ‘relics’ and far from accurate or believable. But with a considerable amount of modding – including trying to reduce the relicing, stripping the neck finish and oiling and waxing it, plus a fret dress and polish, a lot of fingerboard edge rolling, a steel block Wilkinson vibrato with added titanium saddles, a bone nut, oh, and a set of Bare Knuckle ’63 Veneer Board single coils and posh wiring loom – it’s a guitar that’s often gigged and recorded with. What we and many others have done is, in fact, the foundation of the ProShop.
The three-strong team – manager Nathan Sharp, his brother Chris, and Neil Robshaw – moonlight in the ProShop alongside their other duties at parent company John Hornby Skewes’ HQ in Garforth, Leeds. “We’re probably looking at making around 300 ProShop guitars a year – that’s quite a lot of work for our team on top of the other things we have to do here,” laughs Nathan. “But obviously it’s not all one-off bespoke builds like yours. There are the limited runs we do where it’s more of a simple upgrade from the stock model, something different for the customer, where we’re not talking about the eight to 10 hours or more spent producing an individual build.”
This all affects the final cost of the guitar, of course: the fewer work hours and the fewer parts that are upgraded, the more attractive the end price. Not that we gave that any thought at all when we were asked to order up a custom ProShop model for review that we’d based on the Vintage Reissued V72…
Go Bespoke
“On your build, instead of using the standard V72 body, stripping and refinishing it, it was actually a new body that we got made at the Vintage factory and shipped over because it was a new pickup configuration,” Nathan explains. “We do similar things but not with a P-90 soapbar route. Also, unlike the standard V72, there isn’t a flame maple veneer on it because we knew we were going to do the black finish for you. So we had to wait to get that body in, then it was a case of spraying it as fast as we could to meet your deadline.
“Actually, after I’d put the white primer coat on I thought it looked so good I was going to give you a call and suggest we left it like that! It was lovely, the paint was just dropping into the grain – there was virtually no finish at all.”
As we write in our review, the neck and fretwork is very nicely done. “You can thank me for that,” chuckles Nathan. “I kept the neck quite natural looking with the staining and the wear. The neck finish is actually an acrylic, like a sealer; it just keeps it very natural feeling, rather than going to town with a heavier lacquer.”
So, if the basic chassis of our build upset the apple cart a little, our boutique-y concept hardly helped, not least the specified aluminium control plate with its three-way toggle, rather than the standard three-way lever switch.
“Neil made that for you – he whittled it out of some aluminium we had,” continues
“We’re making around 300 ProShop guitars a year – but it’s not all one-off bespoke builds”
Nathan. “He shaped it then I aged it, like all the parts, in-house. It’s not an acid process, it’s more natural. We’ve custom-built a rotary device that you can put various types of hardcore in, stones and things, and water, and then we time how long the parts are in process. If you leave them in there all day you end up with parts that look as battered as anything – then we leave them in longer [to soak] to achieve the rusting. The aged parts are then stripped down and re-oiled ready to go on the guitars. The Bigsbys that we do all come out different, the way the process attacks the black paint that’s on there. It gets some very natural wear patterns, but, yes, there’s some stripping down afterwards.”
Even the trendy cut-off bridge we specified caused a problem. “It is a Wilkinson bridge, but it was a full T-style bridge that we cut down, which loses the
branding on the front. Then, after ageing them, we added those brass Duplo saddles. The R Series Wilkinson pickups you requested came in clean, too, so we needed to age their covers.”
By this point in our conversation, this writer is feeling rather embarrassed that we’d put the ProShop to so much trouble. But it didn’t stop there. The V72 doesn’t come with a tortoiseshell scratchplate, so Nathan got to work
“That started as a standard T-style plate, but because of the f-hole it had to be reshaped. Then I needed to recut the pickup hole for the neck P-90.”
While many of the lower-priced ProShop builds will use the wiring looms of the standard Vintage models, our particular build specified CTS pots, a partial coil-split and an Orange Drop cap, which adds to the parts’ cost, plus there’s the additional time needed to wire it all up. But there were still more things to get right.
“Your build went through a few changes,” Nathan tells us. “It had a white pickup mounting ring for the bridge humbucker at one time. You see, you’re putting things together like a jigsaw and asking yourself what looks right. So, before we’d put the scratchplate on, that white pickup surround, which matched the top edge-binding, looked great. But with the tortoiseshell it all began to look too busy. That’s why we went with the black pickup surround. I wasn’t sure about those witch-hat knobs, either – they look like cooker knobs – but I now think they look right on that specific guitar.”
All this work, the transformation, makes it difficult to assign a country of origin, doesn’t it? “Well, we do now say ‘Built in the UK’ as it’s probably about 80 per cent of the build process that is done here. And, of course, all the guitars are designed here in the first place. Also, we are literally hitting most countries with these builds; it’s not just the UK. A lot of places are very excited to get guitars that are built in the UK at a price that’s right for them: China, Japan, Germany, Sweden… pretty much any country you can name,” Nathan concludes. “Hopefully, people will see the one we’ve built for you and say, ‘Yes, I like that … but can I have it with this?’”
“[On custom builds] you’re putting things together like a jigsaw and asking what looks right”