Feline Panther Sustainer - my own personal guitar (and the first Feline..kind of)

FelineGuitarsFelineGuitars Frets: 11496
This guitar has kind of been like Trigger's Broom.
A few of you will have seen this bad boy over the years, especially as it was the first guitar in some format to ever wear the Feline name on it. I thought it worth featuring as we are unleashing our 25th Anniversary models on the world.



I started making this beast in 1988 - the original body was (and still is if I dig it out ) a heavy as hell slab of Brazillian mahogany
At the time I wasn't making necks so I took an ESP neck with a Charvel like headstock and put that on 
it was a great guitar - huge sound and at the time just a single HB in that classic late 80s hair metal style
Guitar was white with a black headstock fascia to begin with.
I came back from seeing Whitesnake at Donnington in 1990 and decided to paint the headstock white after seeing Adrian Vandenberg playing an all white Peavey Vandenberg onstage.

The name on the headstock was Jonathan Law Guitars or suchlike for about a year or so and then i redid it a bit later deciding I wanted to put the Feline name I had been toying with for a good while.
So it became the first guitar to have the Feline brand on it! (sometime around 1992)

It was an easy guitar to play and had Schaller machineheads a real Floyd Rose and an EMG 58 (sometimes swapped for an 81 or a passive pickup too for a while. It had a huge sound - like a late 70s Les Paul.
The old neck got scalloped from the 13th to the 22nd fret out of frustration with my fingers slipping off strings when playing a George Lynch solo.

I had the whole thing refinished by a paint finisher I was using some time around late 90s and had a vinyl boot pattern logo put on - pinched from a motif on a shoe catalogue a girlfriend had.

Now eventually I decided that the neck was a bit too skinny at the nut as it had started as a 42mm nut and maybe lost a whisker here and there with all my tinkering around so I went for a new build and decided to get some inlays cut out to match the boot motif. I was gonna keep the scallops too as they were great fun. I upgraded the block of the floyd to a cold rolled steel one which took the great sound just one stage further.
It was far from perfect in every way especially as it had all my learning experiences contained within it, but Oh what a guitar it was.....

Now I had already added a single coil at the neck to get some clean single coil stuff too, and this later got changed to a humbucker  - partly for the sound and also because I was trying to lighten the weight of this beast of a body that actually did weigh like a Les Paul>

So it was looking like this:



And so it stayed for a long while , until I realised it wasn't getting much love simply because the weight factor was putting me off, so I simply decided to find another solid bit of mahogany but somewhat lighter than the original
I made a near identical body as I loved everything else about it but the weight.
I did however revert back to a single coil size neck pickup, albeit in the shape of a Sustainiac single coil.

This is the final resulting guitar and I confess I love it a great deal, and it is one of my favourite Floyd Rose equipped guitars ever....positioning the floyd studs carefully is important to me to allow maximum movement of the floyd with minimum rise or fall in the strings at all (IE: keeping the saddles close to the fulcrum)

Controls are a 3 way selector switch and a single volume (the sustainer sounds good as a regular pickup)
The second control is a drive intensity control for the sustainer
The two mini switches are an ON/OFF for the sustainer and a Fundamental/octave selector switch 



You can see that knowing I was going to scallop the frets I moved the side dots over a little.
An ebony board on a 3 piece quartersawn neck (as ever) with Dunlop 6000 fretwire


The original Jem like rear scoop making the heel block a bit thinner and the recessed bolts fitting into threaded inserts in the neck for 100% tight fastening. You can see the oversize block and the double battery box - running in parallel so still 9v but twice as much capacity for the battery hungry sustainer.



Still got a Charvel-esque look to the headstock . Using Non locking sperzels but really fancy some ratio tuners on there, although not so important with a locking nut.



I did just get some matching printed pics to go with it (bit silly but I was ordering some special 25th Anniversary ones too)



Many guitars have a re-sale value. Some you'll never want to sell.
Stockist of: Earvana & Graphtech nuts, Faber Tonepros & Gotoh hardware, Fatcat bridges. Highwood Saddles.

Pickups from BKP, Oil City & Monty's pickups.

  Expert guitar repairs and upgrades - fretwork our speciality! www.felineguitars.com.  Facebook too!

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Comments

  • GoldenEraGuitarsGoldenEraGuitars Frets: 8820
    tFB Trader
    Awesome guitar :) 
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  • a proud demonstration of your history Jonathan ...
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  • monkey42monkey42 Frets: 336
    Beautiful 
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  • axisusaxisus Frets: 28280
    Nice story and cool looking guitar!
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  • SchmoSchmo Frets: 168
    What a bloody great guitar & back-story. Love this kinda thing...
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  • sawyersawyer Frets: 732
    Looks cool! Big fan of this sort of thing.
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  • SchnozzSchnozz Frets: 1926
    I had similar scalloping on a Lag 'Beast' and it was so helpful! I really think there's a gap in the market for this style of guitar and I thought Grover Jackson would pick it up, but he didn't and GJ2 turned into Friedman etc.

    I would like a Feline like this, but it take so long to shift a guitar and free up funds nowadays - Would be nice to do some Superstrats for the 25th Anniversary.
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  • Cool story on the first "Feline" guitar. Nice run-through on how the guitar progressed/changed to your liking. 

    Happy new year (and 25th anniversary) to you and Feline =) 
    Kemp Guitars - Custom Made Guitars for the Modern Rock & Metal Guitarist
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  • FelineGuitarsFelineGuitars Frets: 11496
    tFB Trader
    I was looking for some earlier photos but being non digital back then they are not so easy to locate (lol). 

    Many guitars have a re-sale value. Some you'll never want to sell.
    Stockist of: Earvana & Graphtech nuts, Faber Tonepros & Gotoh hardware, Fatcat bridges. Highwood Saddles.

    Pickups from BKP, Oil City & Monty's pickups.

      Expert guitar repairs and upgrades - fretwork our speciality! www.felineguitars.com.  Facebook too!

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