Do they know it's Christmas...

Disclaimer : First of all, sorry, I know I should be working on the album but I'm out of inspiration. Secondly, I'm not exactly a guitar person but I'm keen on learning by doing.

For some background info, when I moved in to my current apartment I found a bare Stratocaster from the basement, apparently a previous resident had left it there and forgot to pick it up. The basement was then, after a few years, cleared from all the junk but the guitar was left in place, so I decided to give it a new life.

First I detached the neck and installed it to my Telecaster (shameless but somehow it felt like the right thing to do), started fitting in the Tele neck and painted it white. As can be seen above, the guitar had some wirings, output jack and a tremolo claw left in it (not pictured)

After the base paint job (also some sanding & carving) I painted it red and used self-crackling lacquer for a road-worn look and began ordering the missing parts. I ended up getting a Gotoh GE-101T tremolo bridge and an EMG SRO ST11 prewired pickguard (it has a nifty PC board with connectors so no soldering is actually needed) with 3 EMG Sro C-1 Single Coils, as well as a new set of strings, a case, a strap and a bunch of miscellaneous spare parts such as pickguard screws and strap pins etc.

Above is a close-up picture of the mid & neck microphones. Before installing the pickguard, electronics and the bridge I was forced to spray-paint it black because I messed up the red paint job and ran out of paint. I then accidentally forgot the body drying in near-zero celsius temperature which to my surprise made the black spray paint crackle, revealing the underlying red paint nicely.

Above can be seen the final product in its case. I gently sanded off the "Tele"-text from the Squier neck, highlighted the remaining letters with copper paint and painted a flame burst on top of the sanded area (I could've used a decal but I didn't have one at hand nor did I have any idea where to get one) The headpiece and the fretboard were treated with the same self-crackling lacquer, and the whole thing was assembled and tuned accordingly. The end result was a fully refurbished guitar with a road worn look, crackling leather-like body and a custom headpiece.

Here's a close-up of the neck plate which reveals the origin of the guitar. It took me some time to figure out the electronics, especially ground wiring, to eliminate the hum and noise (it's almost noiseless now, tested using a Vox Pathfinder amp) since the hot and ground were mixed in the output jack (I solved it by flipping the output jack-to-PC board connector)

Other minor fixes included checking the relief, adjusting the truss rod and getting the strings to proper height. It took me about 2 months from start to finish.

It sounds as awesome as it looks, by the way.

Happy holidays!

P.S : I'll give this project guitar as a Christmas present.

#DIY #electric #guitar #stratocaster #fender #emg #vox #barrington #refurbishing #werks #foxxe #gotoh