My DIY Stratocaster clone

Realization details of my DIY Stratocaster clone electric guitar.

All begun watching the Crossroad festival with Clapton and Dylan playing together their electric guitar... Dylan's guitar left me astonished... "my guitar will be like that" I though and some months later, this was what I got.

Woods

The body was recovered from an old electric guitar... classic acer vody wood seemed to be pretty clean and allright. I bought the neck from Mightymite.com. It was a 3 woods replacement neck with ebony fingerboard. I spent some days to paint the neck top with a black glossy laque. The result was really amazing (but it caused a bad nytro smell in my colledge bedroom for several days).

Hardware

For what it concerns the tuner keys, my choice was a set of gold plated Wilkinson auto-locking tuners. For the bridge, instead, I've chosen a classic six screws strat. tremolo, vintage, brass-plated. The pickguard was a classic strat white/pearly which marries very well with the golden color of the bridge.

Electronics

Here comes the most interesting part: the pickups. I collected all my favorite guitar players in a my pickguard: - Neck pick-up: Fender Texas Special Neck: from S.R.V. - Middle pick-up: Lace sensor gold: from E. Clapton. - Bridge pick-up: DiMarzio HS-3: from Y.J. Malmsteen.

All pickup wires have been shielded with a copper shield (see photos). The whole body housing itself has been shielded using aluminum foil. Additionally, I applied a further shield over the the Fender Texas special pickup, which has the defect of being pretty noisy. Results are really satisfactionary: of course it's not silent as an humbucking but is close enough.

In order to further reduce noise, all shielding are connected together to the first ground point (near the jack plug). The tone pot uses the classic Strat tone scheme with one customization: I used a Fender deluxe tone pot. It is identical to normal ones except for the fact that when the pot is turned down to zero (ideally no tone cut) the signal is electrically disconnected from the RC low-pass filter, so no signal is routed through it, improving the cleanliness and noise level.