Here is what is inside my 1958 Esquire. There are many things you want to check for in here, before buying. However, a lot
of the talent in knowing where to look will come from study and hands-on experience with vintage Fender guitars. Since this is
'Spotting the Fakes 101' we are going to keep it fairly simple. Esquires used a three cap (short for Capacitor) set-up and one resistor. In 1956 Fender used something called a Cornell Dubilier, but just after that went to flat white caps called 'phonebooks'. Caps were .05 @100V s. Now that you see how complex this can get, all you want to know is who to take it to for an appraisal and a little about what is going on inside yourself (since you are buying the guitar). The little photo here is a .05 @100V Cap (the phone book one looks like a little phone book, no joke). When it comes to the wiring, and the soldering... a professional can tell if the connections are 'original' or have been re-done. If anyone out there has ever assembled (as a kid) one of those 'make it yourself' transistor radios, and had to mess up the soldering, you know that the more you re-do things on a connection, the worse it looks, and the more 'mess' you leave. Suffice it to say things should look rather clean with all connections, and all the parts (for the given Fender year) should be correct. Since this Esquire once had been converted to a Tele by someone, and then put back to original again with a period correct Fender wiring harness, the connections you see should be mostly original, apart from a couple that it would have been necessary to resolder to get the harness back into the guitar and attached to the pickup and jack attachments.
