The Project - Complete

On March 9th 2013, I began this photo and journalistic blog documenting a project, to salvage what was an unplayable guitar of my friend Scott's - a guitar that really hasn't been played in 20+ years. The purpose was first, to see if I could adequately clean up and make the guitar playable as well as to get the guitar to look and play similar to how it used to play.

I'm happy to announce both goals have been accomplished. (yay!)

The finished guitar was put together about a week ago, and today I've completed the wiring, had to route out a bit more wood from the inside of the pickup cavity for the pickups, and then performed a setup and intonation.

Some observations:

First thing is, no guitar will go together easy-peasy, especially when buying after market parts. There will always be something that won't quite fit, that needs a bit of a shave to get it to fit properly or to get it fit at ALL. In this case, the aftermarket parts were manufactured to fit an American made Stratocaster and not a mid-1980's Japanese Squire Stratocaster. Yes, Jules from Pulp Fiction was right, the difference is the metric system.

The pickguard needed a bit of a shave in a few spots, but, the pickup cavity was approximately 2mm too small to fit the humbucker and the neck pickup, which required me to modify the cavity with a Dremel to get them to fit properly.

Also, the neck angle - when I initially pulled the neck off, I noticed a paper shim near the body of the neck/body joint. Probably there from the factory as it looked like a piece of construction paper about 1/4 inch wide. The "micro tilt" neck function Fender created for these guitars should not be used if at all possible. I mean in drastic circumstances maybe but that's it. I needed to shim the neck with a .5mm wood shim ($6 off Amazon), and with an Exacto knife, trimmed it and the neck angle was perfect.

The other part I did but failed to mention last time (in Part 4) when I worked on the finish and lacquer overspray. Because the neck has lots of dings and chips, which I attempted to at least hide a little - the body could not look perfect. Having an almost brand new looking white body on a well worn neck just would look - well, silly. I decided to look up a few different methods of performing a "light relic" look that would go along with the neck. There are apparently hundreds of ways to do this, but I decided to skip the finish checking and left scratches, and put a few indentations into the guitar without going down to the wood. I also decided to put in a few minor areas of discoloration, and I left a few of the paint imperfections during sanding. This is going to let it look a bit less new and more used - for a 43 year old guitar, one would think it should have at least a few dings on the body to go along with the neck.

Of course this is nothing like the amount of wear that was initially on it. Remember?

Next once I got it all together I tested all the electronics (the middle pickup wire slid out of place, so I had to put it back in, (more firmly this time) - a final test and polish and she's ready to go. Lastly I set the pickup height to nearly the standard factory height - but because the pickups are a bit hotter than a standard Stratocaster, I left them around 9/64ths instead of the standard 6/64th's.

There is still one thing bugging me and that is the string tree. Because the guitar originally had string locks on the guitar headstock, no string tree was ever needed. Once modifications were done and the string locks and original bridge removed - a string tree was added but, the break angle of the string over the nut didn't quite cut it on the B and E strings. The string tree should hep this, but the once I have for the guitar barely does anything to help the break angle, so the treble side E string has maybe a 4 degree break angle over the nut which doesn't put enough downward pressure on the string to let it ring very well. I'm going to order a new string tree (probably a Graph Tech) replacement. Otherwise, the guitar is tip top.

I can't overstate how easy the electronics were, with the Obsidian Wire solderless setup. It saved many an hour of cursing and kicking chairs. Highly recommended!

This brings up, the next project which I will hint at here:

I will be putting together a unique looking Partscaster - standard Tele body, neck, with some very high output single coils. I have all the parts picked out already and it should be a very vibe inducing guitar once it's done. This will keep me busy until Fall, if I can get the parts sooner, I'll work on it sooner. This will also be my first attempt at using amber shellac as a finish instead of spray lacquer.

Enjoy the finished pictures. I'll be presenting it back to Scott on his twitch stream today, which I hope someone will clip so I can add the clip here.

Peace yo!