Walnut Strat
Another project guitar – my third (I sold the first). I got the body from ebay – a nice two-piece walnut body.
It was built by somebody “known”, but I can’t recall who. It’s signed in the neck pocket, but I can’t read it.
The first neck I used I got from someone locally. It was solid rosewood with stainless steel frets – a real beauty. I could never get used to the 1 5/8″ nut width though.
I got a used Mighty Mite neck off of ebay and that neck has made all the difference. I know it’s a lower quality neck, but it is really comfortable. I love playing that guitar now. So much so, that I took the Kinman pickups out of my Fender American Strat and put them in this guitar. I also put in a ’59 Jr. in the bridge instead of the Hot Rails. Originally I put a hot wound set of GFS pickups, which actually sounded really good.
When I got the body it had a pretty thick, gloppy finish on it. I’m not sure what type. I was going to strip it off. When I began sanding it, the body started looking real nice. Not factory gloss nice, but very natural nice. I ended up sanding just enough to thin out the finish and get the drips and such out and I think it looks great. I thought putting a “relic” pickguard and controls on this guy would look good, so I tried to figure out how to do that.
I took the pickguard (a new inexpensive one), pickup covers and knobs and follow some directions I found on the internet. I soaked them in super-strong coffee for two or three days. Don’t try that. It’s a waste of time. As soon as I wiped the parts the brown patina came right off. I used a 3M pad (or is it Scotch??) to scuff the parts up a bit and tried again. Not much better. I tried tea next. Slightly better, but still not what I wanted. I tried coffee grounds directly on the parts. Nope. Finally, I got an old basin from the garage that had who knows what in it. I poured in a little Minwax wood stain and I let it sit for a day or two. The basin had dirt in it and remnants of many other projects that hadn’t been cleaned out. The parts were kind of sticky when I took them out, but the color was great. I let them dry out and then wiped them down and this time it kept looking pretty good. I used the 3M pad to put some “wear” into the parts and to my eye it looked every bit as authentic as most relics I’ve seen. Let me just say – the idea of paying extra for a fake relic is insane to me. Just my opinion.
Notice the color difference between the white paper towel and the pickguard. When I started the pickguard was just as white as the paper towel.
Ultimately, I swapped out the “relic’d” parts when I swapped pickups. The main reason is that I was not about to relic a set of Kinman Pickups. They are way too expensive. I could have swapped the pickup covers, but the ’59 Jr would still have been bright white and would have looked weird. By then I also had an old MOTS pickguard that had been naturally aged by smokey bars, so I used that.
I put the same switching system in that I had in my American Strat – a Mega Switch from Stew-Mac wired so the middle position is neck-bridge instead of the usual middle pickup only. I love the neck-bridge combination, and most strats don’t have it. The Mega switch lets you do that without changing how the guitar works or looks – no extra switches and no push-pull pots, which I’ve never been too keen on. Here are some sound samples:
Walnut Guitar – Neck Pickup (Kinman AVn Blues)
Walnut Guitar – Neck & Middle Pickup (Both Kinman AVn Blues)
Walnut Guitar – Neck & Bridge (Kinman AVn Blues and Seymour Duncan ’59 Jr.)
Walnut Guitar – Middle & Bridge Pickup (Kinman AVn Blues and Seymour Duncan ’59 Jr.)
Walnut Guitar – Bridge Pickup (Seymour Duncan ’59 Jr.)
