The Plywood Strat - Renovation Project

[FredA]

Hey guys,
So in between building PBG kits, I got to play with a renovation project.
A friend of ours left me a very distressed strat. It was in pieces as he had been meant to put it back together, but it never happened. Sounded like a fun job, so I took the challenge.

I quickly realised that most of the bits were in very bad condition, so I decided to just reuse the body and neck.
Here's photos of the body and neck before:






Based on what I could see in the control cavity the body was made of plywood. The black part of the burst was hiding the layers of the ply.
So the plan was to paint this one a solid colour. I have never done a solid colour finish yet and this was the perfect candidate, I couldn't make it much worse than it was.

[FredA]

So my trusted assistant and I started sanding this thing to bare wood:





Nothing like cheap labour! :-)

[Dedman]

solids colours are the most forgiving, you can hide a lot of filler and errors under some paint as shown by the manufacturer ! :P

[FredA]

And here is the result:






Once sanded bare, I loved how the plywood layers were showing on the side of the guitar, especially at the top and cutouts.
So the plan changed. I had some spare red Colourtone and I wanted to try wipe-on poly, so that became the new plan.

[FredA]

Before applying the stain I plugged all the old holes, and I changed the pickup route as I wanted to set this one as a HSS strat and it was only routed for SSS:



Ready:

[FredA]

I then stained it red:


And started applying Feast Watson Wipe-On Poly (from the green shed):


It's oil based, and it gives the red a yellow/orange-ish colour which works very well.

Because the body was in very bad condition I spent a lot of time applying coats, then sanding them back, and again, and again, and again...
I ended up applying 26 coats on this one...
This wipe-on poly is very easy to apply, and the final coats were extremely thin.

[FredA]

For the neck I wanted to try replacing the black fret markers by paua. Another first I wanted to try on a cheap guitar.
I drilled out the plastic markers:


Then glued the paua inserts. Some hole were deaper than other and a couple of the paua dots are a bit too low... anyway it looks pretty good.


I then finished the neck and headstock with the same wipe-on poly.
For the fretboard I used the stain coat from leftover Dingotone Colourless Neck Finish as the wood was very dry, and then finished it with Dingotone Guitar Wax:


The neck now had a very nice amber colour that worked very well with the body colour.

[FredA]

It was them time to polish the body. I used wet 1500, then 2000, then the micro-mesh pads 4000, 6000, 8000 and then 12000.
Finally I buffed it with Meguiars Ultimate Compound and Meguiars Scratch X2.0 to achieve a nice shiny finish.

For the electronics, I got from Adam a pearloid white scratchplate, and Entwistle pickups: 2 x XS62N for neck and middle, and 1x Entwistle Nemesis AFG Bridge humbucker. I wanted very hot pickups to make up for the plywood lack of tone. This was going to be rock guitar, not blues!

As it was all experimental I got a special switch, a Schaller MegaSwitch E.
It's pretty cool as it allows combining individual coils from the HB with the SC check it out:

This gives 4x humbucking positions out of 5.

Lining up the bridge and neck:


And scratchplate ready:


I then put it all together and tested it.
The 2x positions where a SC is combined with one of the coils from the HB (#2 and #3) both sounded very thin... not what I was expecting.
So I did some investigation and realised that I must have inversed the HB polarity which was putting the ups out of phase. The sound I was getting sounded like what people described as out of phase sound, thin without bottoms.
The Entwistlle website was showing a colour coding different from the pup box and I must have picked the wrong one.
Once I swapped them all worked perfect!

[FredA]

So here are the photo of the finished renovated Red Plywood Strat!









That's it!
I really enjoyed this build as I had to do a lot of modifications to the body and neck to make it work.
I love the red plywood look and surprisingly it sounds very good, with a lot of sustain!
So it might not be my last plywood guitar! :-)

I hope this quick diary was interesting to some.
I've learnt a lot of techniques through this forum, so this is my way of showing how I've used them.

Cheers!

[andrewdosborne]

Looks really nice Fred and thanks for posting this. The plywood body has come up a treat and has become a visual feature around the sides/tummy cut

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