Stratocaster Project

First you need to know where it came from. Here’s a picture of it with its full finish. It was literally a $120 guitar. The finish had several nicks in it and had peeled in one location. I decided to chemically strip it for a couple of reasons and now having done it, am glad I went that route. Took all the hardware off and the neck, taped up the inner cavity because I had just finished putting copper foil down. You can see it peeking up in the second pickup position (lower left corner). You put copper foil down and solder it to ground which will protect the electronics from any RF interference through the pickups…

Then I applied a some toxic solutions… Although it looks dramatic the actual chemical breakdown took quite awhile. While I noticed some small bubbling after 15-30 min, it took about 10 hours and several scrapes and re-applications of the stripper.

 That paint job was tough! To make it worse, what looks like wood below was really a plastic “undercoating” that wrapped the entire guitar. It only minimally interacted with the stripper. It took me three days over the weekend to get it off.

Then a lot of sanding. Luckily I went out and bought a nice orbital sander to do most of it, but there was still about 4-5 hours by hand put in, especially around the horns. I had to take a wooden dowel, wrap sand paper around it and rub it that way. Below you will see wood and the “coating” still stubbornly stuck in some spots. That stuff was tenacious. I still haven’t cleaned out the innards yet.

A vision – I really debated over how to finish the guitar. I was leaning to a natural stain given the coloring. I later discovered that the bottom (I think it is basswood, cheap) has an alder (has a nice tone, fender uses it a lot) veneer on top of it. I really didn’t find that out until later when I sanded too much L. So at that point I decided to go chrome black with a super high gloss (David Gilmour anyone?). To customize it I wanted to try my hand at inlay. I decided I would do two inlays. One of a Ying Yang. I thought with the guitar being black and with a white pick guard, that would look perfect. The other was the silhouette of a white dove (shown on black material). I chose that because of the lines. I thought I could do it and it looked like something that would definitely compliment the guitar. I found a website that sells these, the guy runs it out of his home in Oregon, his name is Andy, really nice guy. Anyway, he imports the shells directly from Vietnam and the inlays are mother of pearl and abalone, and the work up close is just stunning. They really catch the light and throw back a spectrum of colors.

 This is my first attempt at any inlay. I literally have never done this. The hardest part was trying to decide how to route the circle. I really thought there must be an easy way to do it, but to no avail. I ended up just trying to do it free hand. One of my “best” qualities (as you probably already know) is I can be downright stubborn at times. I used a sharpie and drew around the circle. I then took my router and started in the middle and just kept making the circle bigger until I just reached the outer black circle. Then I used a sander bit on my router and kept sanding and testing the inlay until it fit… I did practice this technique seven times on a scrap piece of wood (and I am glad I did!)

Here’s a picture of the inlay in the guitar. I think it came it out a lot better than I was expecting! I purchase a gouge and a carving knife and will attempt the dove. Once they are all in than I sand, paint and apply the finish which will take about 8 weeks or so… I am building the electronics so once the paint is done, I slap on a new pick guard with new pickups and new wiring, bolt a neck onto it and string er up!

For the second part of this blog, please see a Stratocaster Project Part II