[Kid Klash]

Hi guys - new poster here, long time lurker.

I ordered one of the daphne blue Bullet Strats from Sweetwater last November, and it finally arrived towards the end of January (it was backordered). I guess I was lucky, as the truss rod nut was fine. I was amazed with how nice this little Strat was stock, but being the adventurous type, I decided to take it apart, and make kind of a 1960 Strat replica out of it.

After dissassembling the guitar, I stripped the satin finish from the maple part of the neck, filled the stock tuner mounting screw holes and the D-G string tree screw hole, drilled out the tuner shaft holes to 11/32" so that a set of Wilkinson "Kluson" style tuners and press-in sleeves would fit, sanded everything smooth, then tinted it with Fender amber from Reranch. Then I applied probably in the neighborhood of 40-50 coats of clear gloss lacquer, followed by wet-sanding, more wet-sanding, then hand polishing the maple parts of the neck to get it up to the final gloss. When that was done, I installed a set of Wikinson "Kluson" style tuners and sleeves that I got from GFS.

When that was done, I replaced the original white plastic nut with a pre-slotted GraphTech Strat nut, shimming the "fat string" end .020 with a piece of rosewood veneer to match the string height of my other Strats.

I tried several different pickguard colors... the tortoise shell PG looked nice, but my local GC only had two of them, and they were both so warped that they were unusable. So next I tried a white pearl PG from the same GC, but they looked too yellow. Next I tried a mint green PG, but it really clashed with the Daphne Blue body, so I wound up using the stock white single ply PG. It actually looks the best, and I believe is what a 1960 Strat originally came with. The added bonus was that the stock trem cover matches the pickguard, and because the Bullet trem cover is a slightly different size and has a different screw hole layout compared to my MIA and MIM Strats, I didn't need to make a new one.

For pickups, I decided to try a set of the GFS closeout cream color overwound single coil Strat pups ($18 for a set of three!), and went with a cream knob set. I like the sound of these inexpensive pups too - hotter than vintage, but they still have the "quack" and "chime" character of regular Strat pups through my Tremolux, and they really scream through my Marshall half stack.

The stock six screw vintage trem is actually very good, so I kept it, but swapped out the original saddles for a set of GraphTech Stringsavers... I use the trems on my Strats, so the GraphTech nut and saddles help keep it in tune, and also keep me from breaking so many strings. ;)

I replaced the neck plate with a blank chrome replacement, and had the serial number stamped into the replacement by a local metal fabricator.

Then I went to the local craft store and bought a roll of copper foil to shield the body cavity. The shielding turned out great, resulting in the quietest Strat I own. As a side note, it looked like the body cavity was shielded with a carbon-based conductive paint, but decided to use copper anyway.

It's reassembled now, and restrung, intonated, dialed in, and sounds
great! It took longer than I thought it would (dinking around with different pickguards!), but I wasn't in a hurry, and wanted it to come out really well.

I've attached a couple photos of it that I took on our patio Sunday for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.