haxor.fi

Finding a 8-hole 3-ply mint/black/mint pickguard which isn’t garishly green turned out to be harder than I thought. Although the Fender OEM ones have a nice colour, their ’59 reissue pickguard uses the rather uncommon 10-hole pattern and would not work with an 8-hole body. GFS mint green is also reasonably subtle but they only have an 11-hole version. Although all the hole patterns are more or less historically valid for 1959, I don’t really feel comfortable drilling extra holes to a brand new body…

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With a suitable neck and body acquired, it’s time to start adding some hardware to them. The most important parts of course are the tuning machines and the bridge as together they hold both ends of each of the six strings. Poorly fitting parts or loose tolerances can drive a player mad if the guitar constantly wanders out of tune or doesn’t intonate properly. Alignment problems between the neck and the body can also cause all kinds of strange problems later on….

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1959 was a strange year for Stratocasters as Fender gradually transitioned the fretboards from maple to rosewood, pickguards from 1-ply to 3-ply and the drilling pattern from 8-hole to 11-hole. According to various sources, pretty much any combination of those three could’ve happened during the summer as Fender was putting guitars together from whatever parts they had in stock at the time. While the possibility of having a wild, non-standard configuration such as a rosewood fretboard with an 8-hole 3-ply pickguard would not have been completely impossible,…

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