I don’t much like Stratocasters – they’re the magnolia shade of guitars, seemingly everywhere and preferred by people with no imagination. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but I’ve just always found the aesthetic less pleasing, and from a woodworking perspective, they’re more of a faff to build from scratch. Two horns are not better than one (matron).
So it comes as some surprise that I currently have two on my bench. #1 is a newly acquired white one that purports to be mid-80s original Fender Stratocaster. It isn’t. But oddly, some of its parts are genuine mid-80s Fender. The neck is off a Squier, and rebadged, but the machine heads and pickups are definitely genuine. Not sure about the body, it is difficult to tell, but I’m going with ‘no’. Obviously I can’t risk selling it on, and some poor fool being conned into laying out £2 grand for it, so I intend to just get it to within a whisker of authenticity and keep it for my own little collection. It will hang on the wall of my eventual Irish recording studio.
The second I have already referred to in my previous post. It’s the red Nevada strat copy that I bought for about the same as a cup of coffee and a biscuit. It is being Frankencastered to within an inch of its life. First it has turned into an ‘SSH’ (single-coil/single-coil/humbucker) pickup format, using two Epiphone single coils taken from an Epiphone Les Paul SE, plus the one good humbucker taken off the Westfield SG. It’s been sprayed pink, but relic’d with wear & tear, with both bare wood and the old red showing through the pink in places. Finally, to add insult to injury it is in the process of having a Bigsby tremolo system fitted. It is going to be the strat that nobody ever asked for. I suspect it will consequently also get added to my own collection, at even at my planned price of £149, I can’t see it shifting on Reverb.com.
