The metallic blue parts-Strat project!

Here's a new guitar project I built a few months ago. It all started as a parts-caster project in 2015 as I wanted to build a "suhr" style strat guitar with a pointy headstock and a classic shaped body.
Therefore, I started looking for a few quality parts on eBay USA, guitar Fetish and so on. I spotted a few nice components such as a Canadian maple/rosewood neck with a comfortable C profile and 12" radius flat fretboard. I wanted a 22-fret neck, not a 21-fret one. The neck is the Alpha and Omega of every guitar build!
 Once the neck arrived, I wanted to reshape the headstock as it was not precut. The frets were well placed but I was going to level them and polish them anyway. I also bought a matching bone nut that I filled afterwards. The head was already drilled for vintage style tuners so I ordered a set of Sung-Il (the Wilkinson/Tonepros Korean factory) tuners for this neck. The neck was totally unfinished. Once the headstock was re-shaped, the neck was finished in acrylic satin clear to ensure a smoother and "faster" feel. Then, the bone nut and vintage tuners where installed on it. What a playable neck! It was time to find a body for it!













The body was sourced from eBay and it was a nicely cut Alder Fat-strat body with H-S-H pickup rooting to match every pickup combination but it wasn't cut like the cheaper ones that have a pool rooting. This is really good for the structural strength, mechanical sustain and tone of the body. Then the body was painted professionally in glossy metallic blue and some pearl material was added to the color mix. The finish was awesome. Time to assemble the guitar!

 
 The tremolo was also sourced from Sugn-IL and the pickups are Kent Armstrong ceramics with a approx. 5.6kOhms coil resistance and a medium to hot output. They retain the classic tone of a strat while adding some bite and edge to it. The 250Kohm pots keep the output at a normal level without adding bass.
The wiring for this project had to have something more than the classic vol-tone-tone setup without altering the looks of the guitar. Therefore, I wired the guitar up using the mega-strat wiring diagram which provides with extra humbucking SG/LesPaul style tones as the pickups are "blended" in series when the lower tone pot is turned all the way down.
 So, the current controls are: Master Volume, Master Tone, Pickup "blend in series" pot. When the blend pot is turned all the way up to 10, the guitar sounds like a classic strat with a master tone pot (which affects the bridge pickup as well!). The classic 2 and 4 positions of the 5-way selector switch connect the pickups in parallel to get those Dire Straits-like tones.  Positions 1, 3 and 5 connect each individual pickup to the output. When the blend pot is turned all the way down, the positions 1 and 5 connect the middle pickup in series (not parallel) to the bridge and neck pickup accordingly. Therefore, you get fatter, noise-free tones just like on guitar equipped with humbuckers! It's brilliant!

 Once the guitar was fully assembled, the frets were leveled and it was set up with a fresh set of 9-42 strings. There's a actually a video demo of this guitar on youtube, recorded with the guitar directly to a cheap USB ucg-102 Behringer soundcard.

 Making of pics!

Cheers,
Thanos