Samick Strat rebuild

 A few months ago, I found a 90's Korean Samick strat guitar that has seen better days... The guitar was in a pretty bad shape when I got it, covered in dust and not playable. The hardware and strings were all rusty and dirty, the fretboard had old DNA on, the electronics were all over the place and the body had quite a few dents and scratches.
 So I took it apart and decided to turn it into a modern playable guitar. The first thing I did was to clean every part and bolt of the hardware with some wd40, some vinegar and hope for the best. The result was pretty amazing! The fretboard was cleaned with a Dunlop cleaning kit.

Refinishing the body:
 The body had quite a few dents and marks but its relic look wasn't that good. So I decided to refinish the body. I sanded down the lacquer and covered the dents using wood putty. Then, a friend of mine asked if this guitar could play heavy rock, metal and so on; I said "It will play like that when I am done!". Therefore, I sprayed a satin black coat on the body to make it look a bit gothic and "heavy".
The body was then ready for some hardware and a loaded pickguard of course.

The electronics:
The stock pickups and controls were pretty low quality, all scratchy and noisy. I removed everything and rewired the pickguard using  new Alpha 500K pots, a new 5-way switch, 22nF caps, two GFS singlecoil pickups and an ebay Dual rail sc-sized humbucker for the bridge position.
These pickups are so much better than the stock ones, there 's no noise, no feedback and you can get all kinds of vintage and modern tones. As a matter of fact, you can even get some decent heavy metal tones using the dual rail 'bucker.

The neck:
Well, it was a mess, but I had to bring it back to life. After cleaning the fretboard, I did some fret leveling as some frets were worn out. I also changed the old plastic nut with a new graphite one to ensure the guitar will stay in tune. I polished the frets, oiled the fretboard and lubricated the tuners.

The final assembly:
For the finale, I put the guitar back together and set it up using a fresh set of coated 0.009" strings. The result is a decent sounding and very playable strat guitar that stays in tune. It was worth the effort and all the upgrades. These strat style projects are so much fun and you can fully customize them.

Here are some "making of" pictures. Enjoy!

  

 

 

 

Cheers,
Thanos