JohnHall wrote:
At any given time, there are instruments throughout the facility of varying manufacturing dates. Similarly, the production stockroom has bins of assemblies produced ahead that may be of various lots. Then you have to consider, at any given moment in time, several hundred instruments are in transit to dealers all over the world, not to mention the large number held in dealer or distributor stocks.
As such, it's very rare that there's a perfect "hard" cut-over for anything, which is quite precisely why we rarely announce new features or changes until absolutely everything has gone all the way through the system.
There's one relatively minor situation like that right now, for instance, that I'll use as an example. We're changing, only very slightly, our standard guitar string gauging to make the strings better balanced. Not only are the guitars on the floor during this week strung with both old and new sets, we've had to convert over both domestic and international packaged sets (which are different), as well as update retail, internal, and international documentation. It just can't happen all at one moment in time.
John,
I bought a 4003 a few months ago in the UK (according to your serial number decoder "manufactured week 14 of 2010) and what I originally thought was probably some fret rattle is, on closer inspection, clearly coming from the bridge/saddle area. Is it likely that with this date of manufacture, my 4003 has the old fitting? Is there any way of telling from visual inspection?