Custom made Superstrat!

 Here's an 80's style super-stratocaster guitar project. The project started as a 90's Yamaha body I was given by a friend and a nice Jackson neck I bought for 40euros used. The body was covered in sealer and wood putty so I decided to sand it down a bit and respray it in satin white. The cutaways of the body became smoother and the paint job came out pretty nice.
 The neck was a maple/rosewood 22 fret one with a very thin profile. It's definitely a shredding-style neck! The headstock was sanded down and there was some quilted-like maple pattern there. It wasn't that pretty though, so I painted it to match the guitar body. A new set of closed type Grover style tuners were installed on the neck. I love these adjustable closed type tuners more than any other tuner type. Avoid using cheap open or semi-open type tuners on any guitar project as they 're really not that good.
 Next, I had to make the neck fit in the neck pocket cavity of the body. That's not always a easy job as there are mismatches between "fender scale" necks and bodies of different makes. A dremmel tool was used for the job.
 Then, I drilled the body in order to install a Floyd rose licenced tremolo. The body had originally a classic 6-point tremolo on. We decided to go for a non-recessed Floyd type tremolo so all I needed to do was to carefully drill two holes for the tremolo studs. You have to be very careful and measure everything before drilling there two holes on the body! "Non recessed" is the easiest way to install a Floyd on your classic 6-point tremolo strat but you need to make sure that the intonation and action will be perfect before you modify it.
 With the tremolo installed, it was time for the locking nut! The Jackson neck had already a locking nut so I didn't have to modify the nut slot. Modifying the nut slot to install a locking type nut, has to be done very carefully or the intonation will be way off...
  Time of the electrics and final touches then!
 The pickup we decided to install is the Duncan Custom. It's a nice pickup but we wanted all the output we could get. So I modified the pickup by replacing the AlNiCO magnetic bar with a stronger Ceramic one. That's an easy mod that will give your pickup some output boost and extra bandwidth(more lows and highs).
  The pickup was wired on a single Alpha 500K audio-taper volume pot. No tone/output-sucking "tone" controls or 250K pots were used here.
 The guitar was finally set up with a set of coated 0.009" strings and now it's a pure shredding machine! A small tribute to 80's guitar heroes. My friend Nik who ordered this guitar can really shred on it like a pro.

Here are some photos I took while I was preparing the project, enjoy! (open in new tab for full size)

Cheers,
-Thanos