Refinishing the Stratocaster

18 Nov 2007

My heavily beaten righty-to-lefty convert 93/94 MIJ foto floyd Strat was in desperate need of some attention. The frets were cactus and I figured this would be a good time to get rid of the tacky fake flamed-maple finish.

You can’t see much of the body damage in the above shot, but there were a heap of places where the finish had been gouged and the wood underneath was showing.

Dismantled:

As you can see, years of exposure has faded the fake flame finish quite a bit.

Hit with 100 grit on an orbital sander:

After this, I hand-sanded down to 1200grit wet and dry.

Two coats of water-based cedar stain, sanded after each coat:

I wanted the guitar to look old and worn, without going so far as to do a lame relic job. To achieve this I sanded more stain away in areas where it would be more worn.

The Floyd Rose II bridge, which had never been cleaned:

Bridge dismantled, soaked for an hour in WD-40 and scrubbed with an old toothbrush:

The bridge came up great, and even though none of the thumb screws were tight before, they’re effortless now. It was a far easier process than I expected, I recommend it to anyone with a floyd.

Shielding, rewiring, new pot:

I only use a volume pot on this guitar and I prefer the two single coils, so I replaced the stock 500k pot with a CTS 250k. I also shielded the body with copper tape and the back of the pickguard with hick aluminum foil. Replaced the very scratched single coil pickup covers with new ones and replaced the dimarzio super distortion with the original humbucker. I’d put in the dimarzio within a year of buying the guitar (probably ‘95), so the original humbucker is white enough to match the new single coil covers.

I applied one thin coat of TruOil to the body every day for a couple of weeks, lightly (LIGHTLY!) sanding with 1200 grit between each coat. Once I got to 5 coats I started using 0000 steel wool. I didn’t want a gloss finish, to retain the nasty look of the dented 3 piece body

Sent it off for a refret, replaced the righty locking nut with a lefty, and now it’s all done:

UPDATE: More Improvements

The old single coils were a bit thin, but a little bit of routing with a dremel and a pair of humbucker-sized P90’s fixed that up: