Cherry black strat

[Oby]

I had been wanting to do a candy coat for a while. A friend gave me this Fender he wanted re-finished and he left it up to me to decide what colour or style. I found this nice cherry black candy coat.

[Simon Barden]

You've done that very nicely indeed. Well done!

You may want to adjust those saddles slightly so that they are all sitting parallel to the bridge plate. When they are angled like that, you almost always only have one of the saddle screws touching the bridge plate. The other is in the air and you can get it moving with the string vibration and buzzing against the plate.

[DarkMark]

Your friend has got to be happy with that. I’m very impressed.
Edit: is it possible to achieve this with rattle cans or is it strictly proper painting set up?

[Oby]

Actually those photos were taken before I set the intonation and adjusted the string heights. I was also thinking about doing something else with the pick guard but when I saw how it looked in the photo I decided to leave it white.

Acrylic lacquer it doesn't matter whether you use cans or professional spray gun. As long as there's enough coats you can wet sand it and then buff it until it's as glossy as the best enamel job. On the flip side you don't want too many coats or it can chip easily.
I did this one with rattle cans but not your standard off-the-shelf cans. They were custom filled cans from an auto paint shop because that's the only place I could get candy coats. Supercheap and Repco don't do that sort of stuff.
It's definitely cheaper to buy the paint straight and mixed it myself but when I add up how much electricity costs to run my compressor and all the time cleaning my gun afterwards $40 per can seemed cheap enough. I bought 2 cans just in case the finish was a bit rough and needed lots of wet sanding but it turns out these cans have a much better nozzle than standard retail cans so the spray pattern was almost as good as I get from my spray gun.
Decent buffing compound also helps. I used some Mequiars Ultimate Compound on this one but normally I'd use Scholl.