Squier Strat Body

And here's the Strat body I got off Oli.


Tentative plan is strip, fill in the various holes including the channel that has been cut between the jack socket cavity and the control cavity*, refinish, and then load up an HH scratchplate from Axes 'R' Us with some GFS Mean 90s and wire it up using master volume, master tone and a 4-way blade switch (allowing series/parallel switching). Thinking I may go with black hardware.

*The 'plate has been taken off at least once before (badly, judging by the state of the screw heads) so I'm assuming whoever did it decided they'd rather hack up the body of their guitar than desolder or just plain cut the wires going to the socket.

Lestelepaulcaster Design

Well, I'm still no closer to actually being able to build the guitar, but thanks to this software and some subsequent fiddling in MS Paint I have at least come up with a picture of what I intend the guitar to look like.

Lestelepaulcaster

Having thought about the design of the guitar me and FiL are going to build I'm leaning heavily in the direction of a Les Paul/Telecaster hybrid... something similar to the Fano Alt de Facto SP6.

I've been mulling the idea around in my brain for a little while and after going to look for it online to see if anyone else had done something similar it not only turned out that they had, but that it actually works.

The major difference between the Fano and my idea is that I'm intending to have a 25.5" scale and a Tele-style headstock (mostly because I get on better with 6-in-a-line tuners). Materials are still a bit of an unknown, apart from knowing that FiL can source maple for the neck. Not sure exactly how I plan on doing the controls yet, but I suspect I'll go down the route of each pickup having its own volume and tone pots for maximum versatility.

I'm feeling rather excited by this.

Let the planning commence...

Spoke to my father-in-law this morning... not only is he happy to help me out with building a guitar, but he reckons he can source the wood for it as well.

WIN.