ARTifact Custom Guitars™Save Shop

ar·ti·fact, ˈärdəfakt/ noun. Definition - An object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest.

ARTifact Custom Guitars™ offers hand built custom vintage and non-vintage Tele and Esquire style guitars. All guitars are hand made one at a time in Stowe, Vermont using the finest American parts available. For product demos click on the Website tab above. Our goal is to offer working musicians access to high end custom shop features at reasonable prices. Guitars are offered in pre-built classic combinations or can be easily customized upon request. Don't see what your looking for, just ask. We'll be happy to work with you in creating the Tele of your dreams.

Quality - Customer Support:

We don't just talk quality and customer support we act on it. We commit to all full price original purchasers of our instruments the following free of charge:

If at any time your frets are showing signs of normal wear but do not require a new fret job you are automatically entitled to have your frets re-leveled, crowned, dressed and polished. In addition, a free setup covering lubrication, truss rod adjustment, neck relief, action and intonation and any other minor adjustments will also be done at that time. Owner simply pays for shipping. There is no other boutique or factory builder who offers this unique service. We simply believe it should be a standard part of the value equation when purchasing a guitar.

All baseline guitars come with Fender Licensed maple or rosewood 10" radius medium "C" profile necks with medium frets and all fretwork is hand leveled, crowned, dressed and polished resulting in a neck that has that much sought after buttery feel. We hand shape all of our nuts from self-lubricating aged Tusq. Neck relief is set at .012 at the 8th and action is set between .05 and .06 at the 17th fret unless stated otherwise. That's roughly 1/16" at the 21st fret. With 10 gauge strings you can easily bend up a minor third.

We use a high end Elek-Trix solderless wiring harness (http://www.elek-trix.com/) with 3-way Oak-Grigsby switching, 250 CTS audio-taper solid shaft pots, Panasonic capacitors ranging from .010 uF to .059 uF. Jacks are Switchcraft with an Electrosocket mounting cup.
The use of solderless connections allows non technically oriented users to quickly change out pickups and dial in tone at a moments notice. Any musician can now change out their own pickups with the aid of only a small screwdriver. Through the use of a micro switch there are a number of tone capacitor presets that range from .010 uF to .059 uF enabling you to dial in your tone. The lack of soldered connections offers a much higher level of reliability an important gigging and road wear consideration and also eliminates the need for future added expense should you choose to change pickups. Stock PU's are Fender Vintage "52's. Other's available by request.

Most instruments come in traditional '50's and '60's vintage colors with light to medium wear and vintage satin nitrocellulose lacquer finish that features vertical age checking. Necks are aged satin finish nitro with light to medium relicing. All hardware shows light to medium distressing also.

All instruments are warranted to the original owner for a period of two years.

Please refer to our listings here on Reverb for individual instrument specs.

We love building these guitars as much as we do playing them. Thanks for checking us out. For more guitar demos click on the the Website tab above the photo collage banner at the top of this page.

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