About a week or so ago I put the finishing touches on my custom-built Strat, and I figured I’d share some pics. I wanted the guitar to look angelic (my wife’s pet name for me was the inspiration), and I think I pulled it off rather nicely:
The body and neck come from Warmoth. They did an incredible job with the custom white pearl paint job.
As for specs… the body is a single piece of solid Alder, and the neck is quartersawn maple. The neck has a straight 10-inch fretboard radius with Warmoth’s “’59 roundback” profile and a clear satin finish.
The hardware is a mish-mash of parts; the bridge is a Wilkinson modern 5+1 tremolo (which means 5 of the 6 pivot-screw holes are elongated to reduce friction), but I have replaced the block with a custom-made steel block from Callaham Guitars; the old block’s string holes were drilled too deep, and the ball end of each string sat right up against the baseplate — the new block has vintage string depth. The tremolo arm is also a Callaham replacement. Tuners are cam-style lockers made by Gotoh, though I might replace them with thumbscrew Schallers. Knobs are from Q-Parts.
The electronics are a little more complicated than on a regular Strat. First of all, the middle switch position selects all three pickups instead of just the middle one, but the volume knob has a push/pull switch that, when pulled up, changes this back to just the middle pickup. Also, the first tone knob works for all positions except the bridge-only position, where the second tone knob takes over. The second tone knob also has a dedicated capacitor as well as a resistor, which allows me to turn the knob down all the way without completely cutting out the highs.
The upshot of this is that I can leave the first tone knob rolled all the way up, and the second tone knob all the way down, and I can get pretty close to a humbucker sound at the bridge without sacrificing the traditional clean Strat sounds from the other positions.
The pickups are made by Kinman (AVn-62 neck, AVn-62 middle, AVn-59b bridge), and are noiseless stacked single coils — essentially humbuckers with single coil tone.