This quasi-Aelita body/pickguard combination is a mutant crossbreeding of the production model and the technical drawing from the owner's manual: more of my liberal interpretation of an Aelita than anything else.



The thing about this Aelita is that I had been looking at pictures of Aelitas -- both on the site and in Tony Bacon's book -- for a long time. Obviously they are very cheesy-cool guitars. But, when I saw the line drawing in the Rostov owner's manual, I liked the proportions of that "romantic ideal" rendering of an Aelita better than the real thing. So I took it from there. Call it artistic license if you will.

Originally, I had planned to use the trio of revamped Borisov pickups on the clone.



Unfortunately, they are too tall to work with the Fender-style neck joint proportions I had to use with the Saga neck. So I had to use three mini-HB's instead.

I also tweaked the neck/body joint contours of the body to allow me to use a "paddle-head" Fender-scale neck. That way I can have a semi-authentic Aelita peghead too.



The Bigsby-style vibrato unit definitely wasn't the final decision; I was just trying it on the body to see what it looked like, and took a couple of pictures.

Here's another picture of the work in progress:



While I liked the green pearloid pickguard material, it is too thick to use for a peghead overlay on this neck without sanding away 80% of the material -- otherwise the peghead ends up too thick for the tuners to fit. So, in the end "the Barney solution" won out. In the realm of cheesy pickguard material, it's a tough call to decide whether green or purple is the cheesiest. In this case, practical concerns made the decision for me. For the next version though ...



Specifics: an alder body finished with black acrylic lacquer, and a Saga Strat-oid neck with its peghead modified to allow me to cut out an accurate Aelita shape. The tailpiece is a cast-off plate from some old Japanese Jazzmaster clone trem unit that I notched to act as a string anchor. The bridge is some oddball German thing that I found on eBay for dirt cheap, and the pickups are some more of those generic Firebird mini-HB's that I use to revitalize dead Soviet & Czech pickups. The controls are pretty simple: three chrome on/off switches (one for each pickup, duh), a master volume and three tone controls.