The EBay Purchase

Meet Frank. £280 from the greatest store in the world. Ebay. The overall condition is 9/10. The guitar, which is a Fender 50s Strat Reissue (Made In Mexico) would have cost around £450 new. Nice pickguard. Let the upgrades begin.

Moving to the Darkside

Well, after years of disliking Strats in favour of humbucking guitars, I've finally succumbed to the idea that a mid-priced Strat would be a good idea for numerous reasons:

a) It'll provide a good base to learn about guitar DIY and to act as an upgrade project.
b) If it's awful, I can probably sell it again without having spent much.
c) It seems that nearly all of my favourite guitarists and sounds are Strat players...Eric Johnson, Carl Verheyen etc...

If money was no object, I'd plump for the Eric Johnson signature. However, this comes in at around £1600 and I'd still want to perform some upgrades to it such as locking tuners, and probably swap out the pickups.

So, what follows is my progress with the upgrades. I'm not sure how it'll go at the moment. My current main guitar is a USA Peavey Wolfgang Standard Deluxe, and I've always considered this to be the ultimate electric for me. Ultimately I'd like to build the Strat up to a point where it can become my number one electric.

Stay tuned....