Free Guitar

I was given a free guitar last night, It's a Marlin Sidewinder which dates to the mid 80s, but unlike every other Sidewinder I've seen it's a traditional strat clone with 3 single coils and a traditional trem, most of the ones that I've seen have been Ibanez/Jackson style superstrats with either HSH or SSH pickups and a floyd rose style locking bridge. It needs a few repairs, most importantly the pickguard and second tone control but they are easy jobs. Given that it has been sitting unused in it's hard case for over 8 years it was a nice surprise to be able to tune it up and play straight away. On the subject of playing it, it plays beautifully, the neck is smooth and fast but most importantly it stays in tune.

My plans for it are in the short term I'll just repair the pickguard and electronic but in the long term I intend to replace the pickguard possibly with a pealoid one and I might replace the pickups that will depend on the sound I get from the stock ones. according to my research all Marlin Sidewinders were built with HSH routs if that's true then if I replace the pickups I think I'll go for a SSH set with a coil split on the humber so I can still get regular strat tones.

Anyway here's a picture of it:





Edited by N Ellingworth - May 22 2008 at 04:32

Cool! Marlin guitars suffered from the usual consistency problems of budget guitars but occasionally a good one would make it through. From the few I've played, the ones with traditional trems tended to be better than the ones with locking trems. That could be where my hatred of locking trems comes from.

I can have more than one project on the go and I hope to be able to provide an update on that project fairly soon I'm just waiting for the cheque I sent to Trademark as payment for the body to clear.  

I've been able to plug it in and there are more problems that I suspected, first there is a ground loop somewhere in it, that's probably due to the broken tone pot and the neck pickup doesn't even work, but the bridge and middle pickups sound pretty good. As far as I can tell it's 3 single coils but I suppose the bridge pickup could be a stacked humbucker.

I've had a good look at the electronics now and I definitely need to do a lot of work on them, thankfully it is wired to standard strat specifications so I can do that quickly I've also got the pickguard repaired as much as possible, unfortunately it had shattered and I've not got all the pieces so it looks a little odd but it's structurally sound now. Hopefully though by tomorrow evening I'll have a completely usable guitar. 

You're completely right Mike the frets are a bit worn but to be honest that's not really had any affect on playability.

Anyway I'm pleased to say that it is now completely repaired and only has a few niggling problems that I can take my time sorting out. The first thing I will want to replace is the electronics the switch definitely needs replacing and just to be safe I'll probably replace the pots too. The tuners could do with replacing as although they keep the guitar in tune they are rubbish. From a visual point of view the knobs need replacing as the current combination of 2 regular strat knobs and 1 gibson style knob looks weird.

One thing I'm very pleased about though is that it doesn't need to be upgraded the pickups that it came with sound pretty good already although if I did ever want to upgrade the pickups I could in theory have HSH, SSH or SSS setup which is nice to know for the future.

All I can tell you about Marlin is that they were a Welsh company importing guitars from the far east (mostly Korea but some were made in Japan), they produced a wide range of models during the late 1970 and 1980s including acoustics, strats, superstrats and even a V, their guitars were often priced to compete with Mexican Fenders and were usually of similar quality but they did suffer from poor quality control like so many other manufacturers of the era so a large percentage of their guitars were pretty terrible without serious work.

The slanted neck pickup isn't unique, I've seen plenty of strat copies with different combinations of slanted and non slanted pickups. However the direction of the slant is different, it's normally the other way.