I am going to be embarking on the quest of building my own Strat©, so that I don't have to play my 1979 Strat© more often than I have to.
It will be a black body with black pickguard and a maple neck. It will have all gold hardware and Fender© Custom Shop 69 pickups.
I will put my progress up here every time something reasonably substantial happens so all you loyal followers can eagerly watch the impending disaster that is me building a guitar.
As of today (14/05/06) this is what I have completed:
I have purchased a body from eBay. I got an early seventies body, probably 1973 for $355 USD. It has had the finish removed, which is what I wanted, so I can paint it black myself. That has been shipped from the US today so I expect it will arrive Monday week, when it arrives I will sand it down and do the pickup and output routing shielding.
I have also been ordering all the gold hardware and pickups from my supplier which consists of the following:
It looks like all of that hardware is going to cost about $1050, which makes the custom Strat© a tad more expensive than I had hoped, but that's the price you pay for perfection.
As for the neck I think I'm going to go with a Fender© Japanese 1957 re-issue. I've heard nothing but good things about Fender© Japan so I'm happy to go with that. The '57 was a four bolt so I'm going to have to drill two new holes in my body which was a 3 bolt. Not to worry.
Update: 25/05/06.
I have paid for every foreseeable expense bar a hardcase, which will cost me about $350 but I'm not going to get that until my bank account has recovered a little.
The total for the body ended up being $676 as I didn't have to pay GST on it and that arrived today which I was very pleased about, just a week to get here from New York. I have paid my supplier $1050 for all of the hardware that I listed above and another $500 for the neck I will be getting. I have also bought pickguard and pickup screws (Gold) from NZ Guitar Parts, and my copper shield for the inside of my pickguard from the good people at Rothstein Guitars in USA. Both of these things also arrived today, so currently I have the body, Pickguard and Pickup screws and my Copper Shield.
When the body arrived this morning I took a few pictures, one of which you can see here. It had most of the finish removed but some remained, it looks as though what was still there was either a clear coat that was put on before painting or what's left of a natural finish. After a bit of thought I decided to go next door to the very friendly guys at Newport Automotive. They kindly offered to do the painting for me which I decided would be the better option as they are painting professionals and know a lot more than I do about painting my guitar.
After discussion with them we decided that I would do the sanding and they would do the painting, so they gave me a few bits of P150 and P80 sandpaper (for the rough spots) and I went back home to set about sanding my guitar. After an hour or so of sanding and one very sore hand this was the end result
Click to enlarge.
I was pretty pleased with how it came out, some of the edges needed a little rounding out which I did, and also some of the old finish needed removing.
I took it back over to Newport Automotive and left it with them overnight for priming, they're also going to fill in the few little chips in the body. After it's been patched up and primed they'll leave it in their paint baking oven overnight and I'll go grab it first thing in the morning and spend the day sanding down the primer. Come Monday morning I'll take it back over to them and they'll put the paint on it.
All in all I'm pretty pleased with my progress today.
Update: 09/06/06
Excuse the long delay since the last update, I have been on holiday.
Since my last update my body received it's primer coat and a little putty to fill in the patches, when I went to pick it up after priming it looked like this:
Click to enlarge.
So my task was to do some more sanding, for this I recommend using a mask of some kind, after ten minutes of sanding I was getting pretty dizzy. I used P320 sandpaper for this job, it took about two hours to get the primer down to the right level and get rid of the excess putty. Here was the result:
Click to enlarge.
I had the sanding done by late Friday night. I spent the next 2 days working on the shielding, which involved cutting up lots of bits of tin foil into the right size, I doubled it on itself because I didn't feel it was thick enough, and I glued it into place using contact glue. It was a quite long and tedious job but it should create a noticeable decrease in hum. Here's how it ended up:
Click to enlarge.
Not very pretty, but it does the job and anyhow, it will be covered by the pickguard. Now that the sanding and shielding was done the body was finally ready to be painted, so I took it next door and left it with them overnight, the next day I got back my beautiful shiny black body, which needed to be hung up somewhere warm and dry to cure for two weeks. A couple of pictures:
Click to enlarge.
As of today there are three more days in that two weeks remaining, after which I will take it back to them and they will buff it to remove the few minor imperfections. My supplier bought my neck late last week, once it arrives at his address he will ship that, along with all my other remaining parts to me.
27/06/2006
All of my parts except my neck arrived today! After I opened up the box and checked through all the contents I sat down and considered how I would go about putting it all together. I decided the smartest thing to do would be assemble the bridge first, so I screwed in the spring claw, and put the bridge in. I then screwed down the 6 screws in front of the saddles before I put in the springs, starting from the middle and then the two sides ( I put 3 in ).
Next I placed my copper shield (which I had cut the holes out of earlier in the day) inside the pickguard, and put the Custom Shop 69 pickups in, with the gold pickup covers. I then put in the tone and volume pots and pickup selector switch. Now there was a very large mess of wires I had to solder. Thankfully it's all fairly straightforward and wiring the pickups in wasn't any hassle. The next job was to wire up the output jack and the earth to the spring claw. I did the spring claw first, which was also fairly straight forward, then I had to do the output jack, which also turned out to be fairly easy, so far, so good!
This done I screwed down the pickguard, it was starting to look good! With my neck still in transit and some modifications to the body required to assemble it I decided to take the neck off my 1979 Strat (also 3 bolt system) and put it on my Custom Strat, to ensure everything worked. This done I fitted the rear cover and ran a string through and tuned it up. The success of my project pending I hooked the guitar up to the amp, turned the volume up and plucked the string. Uh oh. Nothing. I figured it would be something simple so I took the output jack off and the ground wire had come out, not a problem I soldered it back up, tried again. Nothing. About an hour of impatience, trial by error, a lot of swearing and mild disappointment the problem was solved. It turns out where the leads connect to the input jack was spread too far apart and they were touching the input cavity shielding and shorting.
All systems go I put a whole set of strings on and started playing. It sounds fantastic. Those Custom Shop 69's are very high quality pickups, they sound brilliantly glassy and plucky clean, just like a Strat should, and distorted they sing beautifully, with sustain for miles. And guess what, thanks to my shielding efforts, barely a hum in earshot! The guitar about half the weight of my 1979 Strat, which is great.
The last thing I really have to do is fit the new neck, which arrived the next day, and it is stunning, a lovely polished maple, barely a mark on it, very good for a 2002 neck. Having done some research I have discovered I have to be very careful with what I fill the 3 bolt holes with, so I'm going to get them filled by a cabinet maker. Here are some pictures of my new pride and joy in her current state.
Click to enlarge.