The "RAT ROD" caster!

  Here's the first guitar project for the 2013! It's inspired by the "rat rod" cars people build. Look up "rat rod" and you'll see that it's like the "hot rod" cult only less glamorous but it's got some style!
 So why build a "rat rod" guitar? It's because I found a nice Squier strat body from the 90's that had been stripped down with the use of a heat gun. The result was a natural looking body with quite a few burn marks that weren't that awful. I think these marks tell the story behind this 20-year old strat and I didn't want to spray a solid colour on that body. I also wanted to hot rod this strat and make it an 80's style shredding machine.
  Therefore, I bought a nice 22-fret MIJ Jackson Performer neck. What a shredding neck! But, would it fit on the body? Well, yeah!  Jackson necks, especially 22-fret ones, are usually fender spec'd in terms of scale length and neck pocket, so it was easy to fit it on the squier body.
 The rest of the parts I used were mainly purchased via eBay. I bought a nice "Sung IL- Wilkinson" 6-point tremolo, a used "Duncan" JB Zebra pickup, a loaded Chinese 1H pickguard (it had an Epiphone PAF pickup on which wasn't that bad), a set of "Stellah" black tuners, a satin clear coat spray can and a few bolts from the local hardware store.
 The first thing I did was to clean the fretboard and put some lemon oil on. Then, I installed the tuners on neck. The keys fell right in the 10mm tuner holes. Then, I sanded down the body just a bit and sprayed a few satin clear coats on it.  I placed the tremolo and electronics on the body and installed the neck. After a full setup with 0.009" strings and some tweaking, the guitar is ready to rock and roll! It sounds amazing and the neck is so comfortable.

Here are some pictures: