So... here it is! But, what is it?
WHAT it IS, is this:

1. Take a custom-made Tele Thinline body, ash with a birdseye maple cap, routed for a pair of humbuckers and the old Tele Custom control layout,
made by Sherman Tate of CST Custom Guitars.
2. Add a pair of Gibson "patent number decal" humbuckers, custom rewound by James Wagner.
3. Develop a new twist on the "Jimmy Page Signature Model Les Paul" wiring scheme (which uses four push/pull pots).
4. Just because I have one laying around, let's add a Gibson/Kahler vibrato bridge...
5. SHAKE VIGOROUSLY!

Actually, I had this body laying around in the closet for a year or two, waiting for a little inspiration...

As stated in the LP/JP wiring page, I got involved in a forum discussion of the Jimmy Page Signature Model Les Paul wiring setup. Intrigued by the challenge - I LOVE a good puzzle - I came up with a slight variation of said wiring scheme, and then just HAD to try it out on SOMETHING. One look at at the control cavity and its huge cover on the back of this beast, and I figured it was a NATURAL for test mule-ing.

While cruising the 'Net, looking for pups, I found James Wagner's old Custom Hand Rewindsite, advertising repairs, hand-rewinds, and other custom pickup work (this was long before he came into his own with his Crossroads and Woodstock handwound sets). I had a pair of old Gibson "patent number decal" humbuckers dead in my parts bin... Hey! Why not have him take a whack at rewinding those?

A few weeks later I was returned a neck pup with an impedance of just over 10 ohms, and a bridge pup that read a whopping 14 ohm resistance! James wires his re-wound humbuckers with four-conductor leads (plus ground/shield), making it easy to realize any kind of diabolical wiring scheme you could come up with - always a dangerous situation when I'm involved with the custom wiring of a guitar!

From looking at the resistance numbers, I expected these pups to be a bit louder than they play, but we've all learned that with pickups, impedance isn't everything. Someday perhaps I'll try a couple of different magnets in them - I've heard tales of swapping magnets making a BIG difference (makes sense to me) - and these old Gibson magnets have just got to be tired.

In any case, what these pickups DO have is lots of harmonics and character. The neck pup is as sweet as you'd ever want - and the bridge pup, in spite of its high impedence numbers, is plenty bright. When coil shunted in this axe, the neck pup solo does a swell Strat and the bridge does a pretty good Tele (to my ears and eyes). I couldn't be happier with those pups in this guitar.

NOTE, 2011: With the new scheme I have now (see below), these pups really shine. The new scheme has them shunting to inside and outside coils, and playing them coils-parallel. Lovely, just lovely...

I never really played this axe much - it was never gigged with, never jammed on, and I didn't even use it on my homegrown CD (and I used EVERYTHING on that). For whatever reason, I think it's because to me there's just something about it that seems oddly proportioned, or something - it's just too fugly-looking to bond with. Can't say what it is about the look that bothers me, it's just... Something. Once I moved on to my ES-333 for all the wiring tricks in this bag, I guess this axe was hopelessly relegated to the life of an odd-ball test mule. How sad! Oh well...

April 2011: So, this year I decided to clean out the closets and clear off the workbench. I did a few neck swaps on Strats and sold a few; but then I got a wild hare and decided to build another Tele (appearing here soon). For the new Tele, I pulled the WD maple neck off of Black Bart, and since I actually play BB on occasion, I pulled the rosewood 'board off of this guy to re-fit BB. Ol' Black Bart never looked so good...

I decided to ebay the cheapest neck I could find just to keep this axe playable - even though it never gets played. I'm funny that way... I landed a nice "import" 22-fret maple neck with a Strat-ish headstock. Once I put it all together, it was, like... Hey, that's a different look... I kinda like that...

I decided to ditch the JP-rethink wiring scheme - it never did grow on me - and rewired the volumes as per the Seymour Duncan P-rails coil-split scheme. That idea uses two p/p to get coils in series/one coil/the other coil/both coils parallel out of both pups. I set up the coil-splits so that the bridge volume p/p shunts to the inside coils, and the neck volume p/p shunts to the outside coils (pull both for coils-parallel, both pickups). I did keep the phase and pups-in-series options on the tone p/ps from the JP scheme, that worked OK by me.

Like most of my dual-humbucker guitars, the bridge pup was rotated so that the slug coil is closest to the bridge, making the screw coil the "inside" coil for the bridge pickup - which makes each pair in the "split" scheme (inside coils or outside coils) a noise-canceling pair when you play both pups.

However, unlike most of my other guitars, I've adjusted the pole pieces up out of the top of BOTH bobbins, to "accent" the screw-coils in BOTH pickups. I did this because in this axe, when you play just one pickup, you can select either of the coils. That adjustment makes the two coils of each pup sound less-similar, and you can select between the hot or the weak coil when playing either pup solo, giving you a couple of subtle nuances.

The Wagner rewinds REALLY like this setup.

It will take some ear-time to decide if this wiring scheme is a contender, or if I STILL find my ES-333 scheme gives me the best all-around tonal palette. So far, I like it very much...

With this wiring scheme (and a few other tweaks I did) and the new look, I may actually play this axe now. I've decided that instead of calling it the Les & Leo Page-O-Caster (what a mouthful), from now on I'm gonna call this axe the Junkyard Dawg - it's, like, a collection of castoff parts, and went unloved for so long...