Contact the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I emailed them and they were very helpful. Fairly quick to respond also. They will tell you all the forms that are needed and the processes and surprisingly there was little confusion on their part.
They always do these stupid limited runs for stores that no one wants and goofy builds for NAMM, which jams up the Custom Shop and leads to the 2-3 year build time that you have.
The Custom Selects have basically made the USA Selects irrelevant. Why would you buy an off the shelf USA Select when for a slight upcharge, you can customize a few options and get away from the same 10 boring colors that they've been using for the last 20 years.
Plywood body. Absolute garbage trem that there isn't a direct replacement. Otherwise, the play and look great. Block the trem and call it a day. They aren't worth a lot either, you can pick them up all day long for under $200.
All I want for Christmas is an active single coil sized humbucker. Basically an active Hot Rail for HSS guitars so you don't have the output drop from humbucker to single coil.
Considering I've never gotten a response from Perle either through ebay or through his website, asking on here is probably the only way you might get an answer.
For as many as he's done, you'd think he'd have it down, but there's everything from garbled messes to decent swirls and I'd rather have a brush stroke-like swirl rather than a blotchy garbled mess. I went with the one I did because it's decent and I could barely drive down to the lumber mill...
Granted, this is for a bass project I'm doing. I'm not sure if I would have gone for this for a main player guitar. I'd likely be more picky for that...
Definitely, ho-hum swirls are a no go, but quite a few of his just aren't good. They aren't melted ice cream bad that a lot of the amateurs try to sell, they just aren't good swirls.
This is the swirled bass body that I bought and it was pretty much the best one out of all his bodies for sale...
I just bought one of his swirled jazz bass bodies. Seems to be top notch and the swirl I got was really good. His swirls tend to vary drastically and at least to me, the bass bodies usually have the better swirls compared to the other body shapes.
Regardless, you aren't going to find a better...
My Squier Classic Vibe Strat is as nice as any Mexican Strat that I have ever played. All I did was swap the tuners and the pickups, but those were done out of personal taste as I don't like Kluson style tuners or true single coils. The Classic Vibe series as a whole has a great reputation...
The Alt 8 is a good choice for the bridge, it's like a JB that doesn't suck. Otherwise, my go to soloist pickup is a Duncan Distortion. Also, swap the neck pickup for a Hot Rail. A Cool Rail in the neck would also be good for something slightly less obnoxious, but the classic stacks are...
For most part, as long as they are MIJ, they are hidden jems. The neck sizes varied on some of these from super thin to "normal Jackson". $300 seem about right for average condition, but the prices of most MIJ Jacksons have been creeping up, especially for the Early 90's Professionals.
They may use counterfeits as an excuse, but I really think if they put the Gibson headstock on an Epiphone, it would most likely seriously cut into the Gibson USA sales. Like you said, the hardware and electronics are really good and they are way more consistent in build quality than USA...