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Oliver Schick
@rickster
My lovely mate Mick (a gen-u-wine '70s pub rock hero who kicked off his recording career playing on You Turn Me On by Ian Whitcomb in 1965 but he'll spit fucking feathers if you ask him about that) has a story about b-benders. Apparently in the early '70s the only guys in the UK who had them were Albert Lee and Big Jim Sullivan. They both had Teles with David Evans benders – the only ones officially licensed by Gene Parsons, but impossible to get.
So one day Mick casually borrowed Big Jim's Telecaster on a pretext, rushed it home, disassembled it, copied the shit out of the mechanism (I've seen the actual blueprint), handed Jim his guitar back a day later without so much as twitching an eyebrow, then vanished into his garage for weeks, built his own perfect version and installed it into his own guitar. And he still has it... it's a white '68 maple neck Tele with a humbucker in the neck. Amazing guitar.