From the Home of Tone bench
Building a custom hardtail Strat
If you follow the workshop blog you potentially may recall a series I shared back in 2023 featuring a hardtail Strat build I had started. Aside from being a fun personal project, the idea behind that article was that I wanted to share the process of making a Strat body with relatively basic tools to help those considering taking on a project like it of their own. So for this I didn't use CNC, it was done with basic templates, hand operated routers, rasps, files and so on.
NRG Fuzz circuit loaded Japanese Fender Strat!
This was a really fun project and idea from the customer to help bring to life. Morgan kindly booked this job in, sparked from a conversation we had about the 'Fuzzmaster' NRG Fuzzer circuit loaded Jazzmaster wiring.
He has owned this 90s Japanese Strat from new (IIRC), and although it has been enjoyed, he fancied doing something fun with it going forward. So he asked if I could implement the NRG Fuzz circuit into his Strat in some form! Ideally the fuzz mod needed to keep a traditional look as well, so no extra controls, no obvious changes to the usual Strat layout etc.
An awesome Ferrari Yellow Super Strat for Ryan!
This was a wicked project to be part of. A great Home of Tone supporter, Ryan, mentioned he had a project in mind quite some time ago, making use of an old Mighty Mite maple neck he had for years, along with a HH super strat body he picked up for a good deal from Guitar Build. After some discussion over time, specs were decided on and parts were compiled, body was painted and it was time for me to get stuck into assembly for him.
I won't go into lots of detail of each step of the assembly, as I've covered a lot of the same kinds of things a number of times on the blog via other partscaster builds. But I'll share the photos nonetheless.
Very much an EVH inspired build, featuring some wicked parts, some of which I was lucky enough to supply as well as install, such as numerous Gotoh hardware items, the Vega-Trem bridge, Tesi Switch kill switch button and all of the wiring.
I won't go into lots of detail of each step of the assembly, as I've covered a lot of the same kinds of things a number of times on the blog via other partscaster builds. But I'll share the photos nonetheless.
Very much an EVH inspired build, featuring some wicked parts, some of which I was lucky enough to supply as well as install, such as numerous Gotoh hardware items, the Vega-Trem bridge, Tesi Switch kill switch button and all of the wiring.
Building a custom hardtail Strat body
I wanted to feature something a little different to the usual content on the blog, so have decided to document my process of making a guitar body. I'll may follow on with more like this if it's of interest! Within this article I'll be making a hardtail Strat body for a project, there are of course some superb pre-made bodies available these days, including custom specs but when you've got a workshop full of tools they need to be put to use don't they! So let's get busy and I suspect as a result the final product will be more meaningful too. I have a few spec ideas that will make this body a little unique, something that has been bouncing around my head for a while so will be nice to bring it to life.