Fender Limited edition hot rodding!

  This nice Fender Limited edition strat is such a nice variation of the classic stratocaster model. It's a 1969 reissue Limited edition reverse headstock Stratocaster with US Abigail-wound '68 style pickups.
  It's got a left hand 9.5" radius, U-shaped maple neck on a right hand alder body and a lefty style bridge position pickup on its pickguard. The bridge pickup is tilted in a way that produces really interesting tones: the bass side sounds open and sweet while the treble side sounds warmer with more mids and lows. I think this is how strat pickguards should be made!
  The only problem is that the bridge pickup is a classic US custom staggered vintage AlNiCo one and the owner is a melodic hard rock fan. A humbucker pickup can easily produce Hard Rock tones but that's a lot harder for a low output single coil pickup(not to mention the 50/60hz hum...).
 So we decided to "hot rod" this strat and place a higher output pickup in the bridge position. The idea was to increase the output without using an active pickup/booster and keep the guitar's original looks unchanged. The word "ceramic" came to mind. 
 After a bit of research, we found a nice ceramic overwound singlecoil pickup made by Tenson that was hot enough to produce rock and metal tones while the noise was fairly low without feedback issues. We placed the original cream Fender pickup cover on and the guitar looks stock. The new pickup is also compatible with the mid RWRP(reverse would reverse polarity) pickup and there's no hum or out-of-phase tone when these pickups run in parallel (2nd switch position).
  After setting up the guitar with a fresh set of 0.009" string, it sounds much hotter on the bridge position though the signal can still clean up pretty good with the use of the volume control. The tone remains bright and well defined due to the single coil tone spectrum(as opposed to humbucking/active pickups).

Here are a few pictures taken during the modification:

 

The guitar as it came in:

 

 Both bridge pickups look alike but there's more to them than meets the eye...

 

 The old '68 style pickup wired in the bridge position:

 

 The Ceramic Tenson pickup is on the pickguard:

 

ready for a setup?

 

 Let's tighten up that output jack:

The final result: