The Project (Part 2)

The work has begun, with a few setbacks which I totally expected. The guitar in question is Scott's 1985 Fender Contemporary Squire Stratocaster, MIJ (Made in Japan). The guitar was at some point painted purple as you can see in pile of parts from the previous blog. This easily came off with a bit of paint stripper and some mineral spirits. The stripper was not able to penetrate the original finish - which was an aged white pearl. The factory paint job was not going to come off as it most likely was a non-laquer type paint. The neck is a slim C shape and the fretboard is a 12" radius which is quite flat. Most standard Strats have a 7.5" or 9" radius, but this was the 1980's so the fretboard is a 12" for the "shredding" which was going on at the time. The frets were filed down flat as was the nut filed down some. I took the neck to my repair place, Raritan Bay Guitar in Freehold NJ for a refret, new nut and a fretboard sanding. I went for medium wide frets (StewMac) which closely approximate what's on the neck now, though, the neck looks as if it was refretted some time ago.

While the neck is getting done separately, I started working more on the body. The body was routed for 3 humbuckers, but easily can use that space for any combination of pickups from single coils, P-90's, Humbuckers, or any combination of the three. I initially spec'd out what pickups I wanted to put in as well as a pick guard to hold it all together.

Pickups:

I was initially thinking of an HSH (Humbucker, Single Coil, Humbucker) setup, but went back to the HSS setup which originally came with the guitar. Instead of using the stock pickups, I felt maybe going with Lollar pickups would be a good choice for the humbucker. They have a lot of selection and functional new pickup types, some with a modern sound, others that give the "classic" sound. In the end however, I went with a newer company, Railhammer pickups which I have recently found to be quite strong, higher output and has a more modern sound. The Hyper Vintage Bridge will be used for the humbucker, giving a very PAF sound but with added clarity in the high/midrange. For the single coils in the neck and middle position, initially I thought a set of vintage Seymore Duncan's, but again, I went the other way. I wanted a bit more punch and output that the classic single coils would produce. I could have gone with a set of authentic Fender pickups, even custom pickups which are amazingly good. But after a bit of searching I settled on set of Bare Knuckle Mothers Milk pickups from the U.K. in the neck and middle positions. These pickups have a higher output than the standard or even Tex-Mex single coils, yet retain the strat sound. All of this will be put into a new set of controls and a 5 way switch from Obsidian Wire, which is a solderless set of controls using 500K and 250K pots, with a built in cinnamon and orange drops. Directions included for the HSS setup. Ben from Bare Knuckle emailed me and asked why I ordered just two pickups (neck/middle) and he made sure (for no extra cost) to custom wind the single coils to interact with the Railhammer through the 5 way switch. Most likely to reverse wind the middle pickup such that in position 2, the neck + middle pickup would really act as a humbucker, and so in position 4, there were no issues with the middle + humbucker.

Hardware:

The neck didn't have the original tuners, so I purchased a set of Gotoh's, same with the bridge, though the bridge wasn't in bad shape. The interesting thing however was the post holes for the bridge. The bridge is a 2 point bridge tremolo, meaning the bridge hinges on two posts sticking out of the body, so when using the trem, the bridge pivots on those two round posts, leaving the springs in the back to pull the bridge back in place. The 1985 Contemporary however used a locking nut which also was not on the neck any longer. With this removal, the guitar may need an extra string tree, but otherwise will not need further modification. A new pickguard, custom knobs and barrel input jack were also purchased. A set of locking strap locks will also be added.

The Body:

Overall the body is in decent shape. After removing the purple paint, I started the sanding process and got through the front before my orbital sander took a dump. The orbit pad deteriorated after years of use, so off to Amazon to buy new pads. With 60 grit the finish and paint came off relatively easy. Inside the horns was the harder part to do by hand, though a Dremel with a sanding attachment made that easy as well.

After looking at the bridge pin holes, it was obvious that quite a bit of fixing was done on this guitar, either from the factory, or after. The original bridge holes were filled with dowels, and a new set of holes were drilled. The new holes were about 1/4 inch closer together than the original - so it seems the guitar initially was drilled for a hard tail bridge, but modified and re-routed for a tremolo bridge. They may have done this at the factory as the body may have been initially made as a standard body/hard tail, then was converted. The new holes however on the treble side, broke out, and there's a patch of wood that was glued to make the hole usable. (See pic below). There also seems to be extra routing of the body which is basswood. This makes the body a little lighter than normal, at around 3.5 pounds. There are a few dings that need to be filled before final sanding, otherwise the body is in pretty good shape.

That's it for now, here are a few pictures from the work so far.