Olympic White Strat Body Relic

I have been working on this for a while now - a Customer sent his Tobacco Sunburst Strat in for a re-spray and relic job. I have photographed much of the process (I have left out a few "trade secrets"..)
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:

New Strat Build with EMG's

I finished a pair of Strats a few weeks ago - here are some pictures and info:



Specifications:

Solid Mahogany Body with Spalted / Flamed Maple top
AAA Flame Maple Neck with Maple Fretboard - Abalone Inlays
EMG-DG 20 Pickup's - http://www.emginc.com/products/index/56/11/1
Callaham USA Vintage S Tremolo and Hardware in Nickle: http://www.callahamguitars.com/partsstr.htm
Callaham Vintage Split Post Tuners
Bone Nut
Pro Setup
£750 (Cheaper than an off the wall USA Strat)

This Strat has the perfect "Strat" sound - I am very pleased with the finished guitar.

Survey & New Model

I have put together a 10 question survey (Click HERE to take the survey) It asks questions about your preferred design and hardware for a custom electric guitar. The results are quite interesting. So far the results indicate that the Les Paul is the most desired shape, in mahogany, flame maple top, set neck, rosewood or ebony fretboard, gold hardware, seymour duncan pickups, traditional les paul 2 piece bridge tailpiece (or floyd rose) - sounds like a Les Paul style guitar to me.

Thats good news as I am working on a prototype for my next run - I have loosely decided on the following specifications:

Les Paul shape body Florentine Cut
Mahogany Body & Neck
Matching Top, Back & Headstock in Maple (Flame, Quilt, Spalted or Birdseye)
Double Binding on Body (Front & Back)
Rosewood Fretboard with D'Angelico New Yorker style diagonal split block MOP inlays
Traditional "Les Paul" style bridge / tailpiece OR Bigsby trem unit
Various pickup configurations to include dual humbuckers, Soapbars, TV Jones Style - also the ability to upgrade and have named brand pickups installed (Seymour Duncan's etc)

I should have a prototype in the next month or so - I will post pictures as it develops.

Finally, I am am also working on 3 Stratocaster's and a Telecaster which are Mahogany body with mahogany necks and spalted maple tops - these are going to be configured with very very high end components - again I will post pictures as the build comes along.