Wednesday, October 26, 2011

NGD - The StratoHog

Another Rondo deal here: http://www.rondomusic.com/sst57mhlh.html

A mahogany strat w/P90's?  Why not?  This is a nice heavy beast.  The grain of the three-piece body is beautiful and really the main reason I bought it.  It needs all of the upgrades that most SX's do: new nut, strings, saddles, block, locking tuners, pots, cap, output jack and de-goo'ing the neck.

So besides replacing the parts as mentioned above, here's the plan:
I've got 2 SD59 pickups collecting dust.  I'm not a fan of noisy P90's. New pickguard + old pickups = sweet sounding strat.

I've read that the string spacing is so different on strats that the pole pieces on traditional humbuckers don't line up with the strings so you have to use "trembucker" pickups.  I held up the SD to the strings and they seemed to match perfectly to my naked eye so I'm moving forward with it.

Here what it looks like now and then what it will sort of look like when I'm done (but left-handed):
 

I'll post pics as I make progress on the transformation.  Stay tuned!