But first, let's take the Wayback Machine to 1984. "Ghostbusters" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" top the box office, Van Halen gives us the eternal advice "might as well jump," Michael Jackson catches fire during a Pepsi commercial, and an 11-year-old me goes into a guitar shop with my parents and gets a new Hondo pseudo-Strat, my first guitar. As you can see from the picture, it's a typical Strat-style guitar, black with a white pickguard, three single coils, a fulcrum tremolo, and a maple neck and fingerboard. The only tip-off that it isn't a Fender is the black headstock with the Hondo logo. This is the guitar that served me throughout my early guitar lessons, but during one of my guitar down times I put it away and when I resumed playing, I ended up going through a string of other guitars - a black Hondo Les Paul copy, an Epiphone Flying V, and finally a red Charvel Model 2 - after which I sold it to my friend's dad for way too little money. 80 bucks, I think. I never thought I'd see it again.
Then fate stepped in.
In March of last year I bought a new Fender Stratocaster. It was a birthday present from my wife (thanks Hon!) and it looked suspiciously similar to my old Hondo - black and white with a maple fretboard. I mentioned this similarity in an email to my old band mates and one of them - the one who's dad I'd sold the Hondo to - said that if I want, I could have my old guitar back. The wife and I were planning a trip back to visit relatives anyway, so I arranged a pick-up and brought it home with me. The picture above shows it as it was when I brought it home. It wasn't in that bad of shape - in fact, it looked a lot like it did when I sold it. The tremolo was blocked off and hardtailed, the switch was re-wired for some weird combinations, and the tuners had been changed, but other than that it was the same. Even had the same strap. Unfortunately, it wasn't in playing condition. It had some bad frets and the electronics were crackly. Still, everything worked and it wouldn't take much to get it back to playing shape.
The first thing I noticed was the bridge. It was blocked off, like I mentioned before, but whoever did this really didn't want it to move. Not only was it blocked off from the back, but it had been screwed to the top of the body. They actually drilled holes through the tremolo bridge and into the body. So, as you can see in the picture, there were two holes in the body south of the tremolo rout. I knew this wasn't going to be a pretty guitar once it was done, so I rationalized the holes as "character flaws" and continued removing pieces from the guitar.
Once the pickguard assembly was removed I was surprised to see that the guitar had a real S-S-S rout. Most of these budget guitars have a "swimming pool" rout - pretty much one big hole - that can take any pickup combination with no change, which is an obvious cost-cutting measure, and I was actually hoping it had one so I wouldn't have to pay to get it re-routed. That being said, not having a swimming pool rout gives more body wood, and more body wood means better sound, so it wasn't all bad news.
The next thing I noticed was the body itself. It wasn't real wood, but wood laminate. At least 13 layers that I could count. Not good. Real wood bodies - even those made from glued pieces of wood like my Fender - resonate better and are better quality than laminate bodies. I probably could've bought a cheap wood body and thrown this one away, but I wanted to preserve the original for sentimental reasons, so I'll just have to live with the laminate body. No one will know but me, anyway. Well, I guess you know now, too.
With the guitar stripped down, I sent it off to Spotlight Music in Fort Collins to get the frets and routing done and went to GuitarFetish.com (great place to get cheap guitar parts, by the way) and bought the hardware. I got an HSS prewired pickguard with a white pearloid finish, a Wilkinson VS50 tremolo, a set of roller string trees and strap locks. When the guitar came back I was going to reassemble it with the new parts and keep a photo diary of the process.
Turns out, it didn't quite work out that way.
Go on to part two
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