The Effender - 1984 Cort Effector Explorer with Fender Roasted Neck

Presenting: The Effender.

This offensive beast started life as a used and non-functional 1984 Cort Effector in the coveted "Explorer"-shape that popped up on Facebook Marketplace somewhere in New England. We're fans of early effects tech, and regularly deal in and repair the previous generation of Kay Effector models, so we took a chance and had this one shipped to our shop in Kentucky.  It showed up with a neck fracture around the 2nd or 3rd fret and insurance was no help at all, so into our "future project" pile it went. Our plan was to just do a simple neck re-glue and re-spray and put this one back together in stock configuration. Fast forward 9 months and this Effector was still sitting in our shop, awaiting a turn in the restoration shop. Several other Effectors had come and gone (even a cool retro-fit into a modern Les Paul) but we never got to put this one back together like we originally wanted. A "luthier" wanted to take a shot at repairing this neck and since we're always looking for more repair help, this was a great way to test their skills. This person seemed very confident in their ability, so we took a shot and gave them the original Effector neck to repair. Fast forward 6 months, and our neck that needed like 4 hours of work finally came back in horrific shape. He took the fingerboard completely off and managed to put the truss rod in upside down before doing a horrible job putting the fingerboard back on, losing the original tuners and nut, and refinishing the neck in black spray paint. Back into the pile it went. Someday I would get around to undoing the botched repair job. Just kidding. I didn't ever get around to it. Instead, we got sick of looking at it and decided to move forward and make it cool and more Fender-like. Time to bolt-on a brand new Fender Strat roasted maple neck! This new neck has a Pau Ferro fingerboard, medium jumbo frets, and a nice modern "C" shape. To ensure that it would play in-tune, the neck had to be bolted on a little bit further from the neck pickup than we would have preferred, but we opted for making it play in tune instead of looking "right".  New locking tuners were installed, and the stock Fender bone nut blank was fine-tuned to play fantastic. This guitar shreds! The stock Effector electronics do work. They don't sound great, but they didn't really sound that great when they were new to begin with. They are usable, and do tend to inspire some creativity, but they are lo-fi and pretty dated sounding. The battery door broke and was reglued. It's ugly, but it works. The neck pickup ring is mangled a bit. The original Effector neck is included. It's savable if you're into that kind of thing. 

This is a one-of-a-kind creation that we hope you'll enjoy playing as much as we enjoyed assembling it.