The Hentor Sportscaster

• published: 07 Sep 2013
• views: 1749

Accurate Hentor Sportscaster replicas are now available to purchase. Handmade by luthier Freddy Gabrsek, these are very high quality instruments. For options and purchasing information please visit: http://www.freddysfrets.com For information regarding the Morris amp used in this video please visit: http://www.morrisamps.com. The Hentor Sportscaster Story It was back in the late 80s when I first had the Hentor Sportscaster on my bench. I'll never forget plugging this guitar in and being floored by the sound. This was no typical strat. It had a snarl, a slap you in the face attack and a boatload of sustain. Fast forward to 2012, I began to notice through the internet that people were building Hentor replicas for themselves. I also noticed that nobody got it right. Usually they got the hardware right, but not the body and neck. A huge part of the sound of the Hentor has to do with the properties of the woods used and the construction technique of the neck. So I asked Alex Lifeson if I could borrow the Hentor so that I could study what makes it tick and then to make highly accurate replicas. Alex agreed, his one stipulation was that a portion of the proceeds from every Hentor Sportscaster I sell goes to the charity "Grapes for Humanity". So how does one go about replicating a guitar as accurately as possible. It's not so easy! The first thing I did was to dissasemble the guitar completely. I took measurements, molds of the neck profile, weights, tap tests for resonance, deflection tests on the neck....everything I could think of got recorded. With this information I started with what was probably the most critical part...selecting the material. Luckily, in my wood storage room I have some beautiful quartersawn, very dense hard maple that has been seasoning for years. Tap testing and selecting the peices for the necks was how I started the build process. The same applied to the body material which is Ash. The Hentor's neck was made by a company called Shark out of Ottawa. The construction method also played a part in the tone. For example, the truss rod is an old school single action "bullet" rod in a curved channel. I believe this gives a neck a different response than a dual action truss rod. I hand carve each neck, checking progress with precision measuring tools and profile templates. Also, the neck has no finish of any kind. This feels amazing! Like nothing else. But because the maple is quartersawn, very dense and stable there is less chance for the neck to noodle or warp with environmental changes. The body is sprayed in nitro-cellulose lacquer. This finishing process is painstaking and labour intensive...especially for white nitro, which is one of the hardest colours to shoot. By the time I'm finished spraying each body will have recieved no less than 12 coats of lacquer. Yet in the end the layer of nitro coating the body is still super thin. Alex Lifeson changed the hardware on the Hentor a number of times. Because of this, I am offering options on hardware depending on which configuration you prefer. The earliest configuration had a Floyd Rose bridge with no fine tuners and no locking nut. The bridge pickup was a Gibson humbucker and the single coils were Fenders. The next change Alex made was to install a Floyd Rose with fine tuners along with a locking nut. At this time he also changed the humbucker to a Bill Lawrence L500. The most recent alteration for the Hentor was carried out just now when I had borrowed it from Alex. The Fender single coils were upgraded to hotter Dimarzios , now the balance between the L500 and the singles was more even. At this time I also upgraded the sustain block for the bridge and refretted the neck with stainless steel frets. The electronics are all high quality parts...special taper CTS pots, Russian paper-in-oil capacitors and switchcraft jacks. The last step in building the Hentor is the assembly and set-up. Because this is so critical to how the guitar sounds and plays, I take the time to make each guitar perfect.