cwebb
New member
So towards the beginning of summer 2015 I started on what I thought would be a short simple refinishing process, it turned out to be a long job that I finally finished around christmas! So its a delayed post sorry for that. So I originally wanted to make a dark rosewood/cherry style strat and that worked at first after stripping the body
and that looks good until you get close to it and it was all runny and looked awful! I then found out that strats have a thick layer of some sort of poly under the paint (first time refinishing anything and I hadn't looked up much about it before hand) and I then was told that I needed a heat gun to get rid of it so it delayed the project about a month or so until I found a heat gun to borrow and I stripped it to the plain wood (although when chipping off the melted poly I tended to dig into the guitar quite a bit and took off some rather large chunks of wood which I then belt sanded the guitar down to a low enough level that I could sand it normally to be even)
and after that when I went to apply the stain (which was the color I wanted originally) since it could actually set into the wood it was a lot darker than I had planned 
as you can see it still stuck out after sanding but luckily was under the pickguard. So I had to settle for a different color (which turned out pretty nice actually)
that picture Has a good contrast of the natural vs stained wood too. Also during this process my one friend gave me the g&b bridge humbucker and neck single pickup that would of been in His Chapman (he order his with a custom custom and cool rails instead and they gave him the stock pups just to use as he wanted) and so I made it a hss strat.
i kept the neck (which I had sanded and stained) as it was with no poly and its wired in b, bsplit+m, m, m+n, n and so far everyone I've let play it absolutely loves the sound and looks of it! (Including me obviously) the only sound I don't care for a lot is the split bridge and middle tone, I should of had it be just the split bridge or the full bridge and mid. Only hardware changes I'm considering is in the future a better nut and fender locking tuners and adding a bridge spring or two because the only real issue with this is its poor tuning stability. Also maybe a roasted maple neck would fit it?
as you can see it still stuck out after sanding but luckily was under the pickguard. So I had to settle for a different color (which turned out pretty nice actually)
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