The guitar started life as a standard Strat with the really thick modern polyester finish:
Stripping off this finish takes elbow grease and a heat gun. I have tried all available paint strippers (even aircraft stripper) with no luck - I find the only way to remove this modern finish is with a good quality heat gun, taking your time not to scorch the wood:
Looks really rough right now but only the top coats have been removed - Fender seals the wood with a wickedly hard product as shown below:
Lots of hand sanding will get you back to bare wood, ready for a bit of Vintage Fender body shaping and some grain filling:
After a final sand to remove excess grain filler it's time for a coat of primer (hand flatting as needed):
Several coats of Olympic White Nitrocellulose are applied (hand flatting between every other coat):
Body now painted (sorry about the poor quality picture):
At this point I relic the body in accordance with the Customers instructions - I would call this one medium / heavy - The basic relicing has been roughed in, along with the aged hardware:
More work is done to smooth out some of the wear - then its time for my light box to blast the nitrocellulose with some UVB-313 light for 17 hours:
This gives a nice aged yellow finish to nitrocellulose - the finish checking applied earlier is also enhanced by this process:
To give us the final reliced Olympic White Stratocaster Body:
