Brownstein Stratocaster - Clapton/SRV Inspired Mashup

Earlier this year in a fit of impulsive online shopping I started to gather the parts for a strat build loosely inspired by Eric Clapton's Brownie and Stevie Ray Vaughan's Number One.

• alder body with 3 colour sunburt finish
• maple neck with pau ferro fretboard
• B/W/B pickguard with ivory knobs and pickup covers
• GFS Trucoil Vintage pickups
• chrome hardware
• Fender mid-boost/TBX electronics kit

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It will hopefully be done this week so I thought I would throw up a thread for it.

The Clapton mid-boost kit requires that the standard strat body be modified to accept the battery and circuit board. I worked on this before I went and bought a router so I ended up using a combination of chisels and a Dremel to hack away at it. A side benefit was that the friction induced burning alder smelled like delicious barbecue.

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Apparently the circuit board will fit in the control cavity if you cut a corner off the PCB. I'm doing the Clapton boost set thing with a Jap Strat of mine at the moment. I must say that the instructions/wiring diagrams with the kit are very poor and I'm mainly relying on other people's installation instructions.

You have reminded me that I will need to do some routing before I spray my colour coats.

Hmm... cutting off chunks of the circuit board sounds like an expert move. Given the oversized pot and additional wiring I'm glad to not have to try and cram the PCB in the existing cavity too. I agree that the wiring diagram Fender provides leaves a lot to be desired. I ended up cross referencing it with wiring diagrams I found online so I think I put everything in the right place.

It turned out that the pre-drilled holes in the neck and pocket didn't match up. The collective wisdom I could find on the forum suggested it was better to re-drill the neck so I went with that approach. I got some wood dowel and enlarged the holes to match. Then I glued in the dowel and trimmed the excess.

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nice work so far, a very cool strat in the making

Yes, I'd also go with plugging and re-drilling the neck.

Have you had one of the Warmoth radius necks on a guitar before? I've got an all-Warmoth parts Tele with the compound radius neck and it doesn't do anything for me. I can't even get a particularly low action on it. I do seem to like my necks with a bit of radius on the fretboard.

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Originally Posted by Simon Barden

Yes, I'd also go with plugging and re-drilling the neck.

Have you had one of the Warmoth radius necks on a guitar before? I've got an all-Warmoth parts Tele with the compound radius neck and it doesn't do anything for me. I can't even get a particularly low action on it. I do seem to like my necks with a bit of radius on the fretboard.

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Yes, my spalted maple parts Tele has a Warmoth compound radius neck and 59 roundback profile. Right now it's actually my favorite guitar to play. I'm not sure how much the radius factors into that, but I don't have any complaints with it.

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Well I've got it mostly assembled so hopefully I can get the strings on and have it set up tonight. In the meantime here's some pics of the shielding and electronics (I think this is the skill I could use the most improvement at).

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Originally Posted by CascadiaGuitarGeek

Yes, my spalted maple parts Tele has a Warmoth compound radius neck and 59 roundback profile. Right now it's actually my favorite guitar to play. I'm not sure how much the radius factors into that, but I don't have any complaints with it.

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OMG that tele is beautiful

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Originally Posted by Andy40

OMG that tele is beautiful

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Why thank you. I didn't know exactly what it looked like when I ordered the body, and when I opened up the box I was pretty blown away.

It's been an evening of stratocaster stringing over here. I finally got the finishing touches on Mr. Brownstein and am looking forward to playing it. I went with 11's for the strings on this one as I'm going to have this guitar tuned a half step down. Now i just need the time to finish the setup.

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Looking great, CGG!