Tornado LG

Price includes a black or white rear-route cover (please specify if you prefer white in the “message” field). The “top” thickness above the rear-route is 6mm (1/4″).

Electrosocket jack output route is optional on all models, and is our only side-mount jack option for good reason.

Other jack plates either sit with the rim proud of the body (leaving a gappy lip in the curved perimeter); or else must be tenuously held in place at a certain depth within a clearance hole. This requires that you mark and drill a hole at a 45° angle, which we find is practically impossible to achieve without the plate ending up wonky.

We have invested our time in developing a CNC toolpath which precisely cuts a stepped hole for the Electrosocket jack. It takes the guesswork out of mounting your jack plate, for perfect and repeatable results every time.

Alternatively, any knob hole can be used to top-mount a standard jack. We always recommend using large washers wherever top-mount jacks are mounted directly to a rear-routed guitar.

Contrary to popular belief, Electrosockets are compatible with angled jack plugs, and these work great to tidy the cable away over your strap button.

Our comfort contours are generally a little deeper in the arm and a little shallower in the belly than most vintage contours (though size, shape and depth of vintage contours varies widely in different years of manufacture and even from instrument to instrument in the same year of manufacture).

We have worked hard to achieve organic, melty contours that don’t exhibit a prominent edge / line where they meet the flat surface of the body – and we pay as much attention to how they combine and sculpt the edge of the body as we do to the graphic they impart on the faces.

Whilst their smoothness makes them more subtle in appearance than some contours, we really bring out their beauty by maximising the surface area – which is to say that their presence is physically larger on the face and back of the guitar. In many cases, our contours measure more than twice the area of our competitors’!

The result is a coherent form and character which perfectly complements the curves of the model silhouette – a smooth, sculptural quality that you can enjoy in unparalleled playing comfort.

Our Tornado LG is based around the original 24-3/4″ scale design, and made compatible instead with a 25-1/2″ scale neck. Since this involves moving the bridge location further down the body, this posed some difficult questions regarding the shape of the pickguard. On the original, the bridge intersects the pickguard perimeter in such a way that the lack of continuity is hidden by the bridge location. The original bridge also has a larger plate than usual for a hardtail, and this compounds the effect.

It became clear from the earliest stages of design that if we were to make this larger pickguard shape viable for use with both the longer scale neck and a standard bridge plate, something would have to give. Our solution was to effectively move the rest of the body downwards along with the bridge, effectively meaning that the scale is achieved instead by moving the neck pocket upwards.

This would create a slightly awkward looking neck pocket when using a 21-fret neck; but when using a 22-fret neck with fretboard overhang, we think it looks great and works very nicely (see pictures). On top of that, it slightly improves upper fret access, compared to our Tornado SG (Small Guard) model.

These tweaks have effectively unlocked the Tornado shape as a versatile platform for all kinds of bridge, pickup and control options in a way that was previously impossible without drastic and irreversible modification to an original instrument. We hope Toro lovers everywhere will appreciate the endless possibilities our solution opens up to design and configure a dream offset instrument that’s a little more unique than your usual offset project.