Guitar Dreamer: Covered in Stripes !

This is my latest guitar project. It started as an old and abused Aria pro-II FS series strat guitar. I've bought at least four Aria pro-II strats over the years... This one was quite in a bad shape when I bought it. The neck and body had quite a few dents and marks, the finish was almost destroyed and the old electronics didn't really work. So I decided to repair and refinish the hole guitar! The finish I had in mind was based in the guitars used by "Grave Digger" guitarist Axel "Ironfinger" Ritt that I've seen performing live in Athens years ago:
http://www.axelritt.com/page34/page36/page1/page7/page7.html

At first, I threw away the old tuners, nut, string trees, bolts and electronics as they were all rusty and non-functional. Then, the tremolo unit, strap locks and jack-plate were removed from the body.
Once the body was cleared, I sanded down its glossy clear coat. Then, some dark wood filler was applied to cover the dents and marks. Once dry, the filler was sanded to become as flat as possible and the body was ready for its first color coat.

The stripes...
I wanted to create an 80's "stryper"-like look for the body. I decided to go for a black and white finish and so the 1st color coat would be a satin black. Once dry, I covered the body in stripes using some masking tape and resprayed the body in satin white. When I removed the tapes, the finish was almost ready but it needed a bit of fine-paper sanding to remove the surface roughness. Then, the finish was shielded with a satin clear coat. Satin spray colors take almost no time to dry up and this is the main reason why I use them a lot.

The neck:
The next step was to refinish the maple neck of the guitar. The "ebonised" rosewood fretboard looked great and I wanted to keep the neck as dark as possible. Therefore, the neck was sanded down and its dents were covered with some putty. Then the neck was sanded with a soft sanding sponge and painted in satin black. I also sprayed a satin clear coat on the headstock of the guitar to match the rest of the parts.

Hardware:
I decided to keep the original tremolo unit after I cleaned it up with some wd40. Then I bolted the neck and body together and installed a brand new set of grover style tuners and a fender string tree on the neck. The nut was replaced with a graphite les paul style one(it's the only one it could fit in there). I also installed a new set of dunlop strap locks on the body.

Electronics:
Since the guitar had an 80's looking theme on, I couldn't go for a classic 3 x Single-coil pickup configuration. Instead of that, an EVH style pickguard was placed on the body. The pickguard was pre-loaded with a cheap humbucker and a pot but I removed these as their quality was very poor. So, it was time to fill the space for the humbucker and install a single volume control. I wired a Gibson 500T ceramic pickup on the pickguard and a brand new 500K log(volume) pot.
Once the wiring was done and everything was in place, I set the guitar up in E-standard tuning using a fresh set of 0,09" coated strings. The action came out pretty low and the fretboard has no dead notes or buzzing issues. The intonation was set right and it was time for a test!

So, how does it sound?
The guitar sounds great! The old Gibson 500T pickup I got for ~50$ sounds amazing and it's a perfect match for the ebony fretboard. This strat sounds more like an SG guitar and it's a shredding instrument. The satin neck finish is so much more comfortable than the original glossy one. Fast playing and soloing is what this guitar does best now!

Here a few pictures of the guitar, finished: