Strat Neck Restoration

[Allen Sandberg]

Here's a good example of a use of "Friendly Plastic" which I used to make a cowl to glue down a maple veneer over a strat neck that I restored. I purchased the Friendly Plastic from Stewart MacDonald. It works great, you put it in hot water and it becomes soft and pliable which you can then use to make cowls, etc. It dries rock hard and wroks great when you have to clamp akward curves.

[Mike Kolb]

Nice job, Allen... you made a fine-looking headstock of someone's misdirected "good-idea-at-the-time". I agree that the Friendly Plastic stuff has a bunch of fun uses, the best part being that it's reusable over and over again.

(unrelated story: after wearing only sandals for too many years -[which I noticed, from the pix, that you're a fan of as well]- one of my middle toes started spreading-away from the others, so I made a "corrective form" out of Friendly Plastic, wore it for 8 months and brought it back into the fold)

But I digress. You did a great job on the headstock... can you share your source for decals? I've seen some small classified ads for them in the back of Vintage Guitar magazine, but always was afraid they were placed there by Fender to entrap the unscrupulous!

[Mike Baker]

Allen, I can't imagine what someone was thinking when they chopped up that headstock, but you did a great job putting it back together!

[Allen Sandberg]

Mike,

Thanks for the kind words. If you look at photo # 17 you'll see a photo of a headstock of a '76 Strat lying next to the the headstock I restored. A friend of mine loaned me his '76 which is what I used to make a template from and I also photographed with a digital camera. I "lifted" the logo from the photograph using Adobe Photoshop. This took about 2 hours of isolating the logo from the rest of the picture and cleaning it up. Once I had the logo isolated I then printed it on "waterslide" decal paper. I ordered this paper on-line. This is the same stuff that decals for plastic airplane models are made from that I used to build as a kid. Once the decal is printed you just spray a couple of coats of spray varnish over the decal to fix it. I had to lay a couple of coats of lacquer on the headstock first, then just soaked the decal in warm water for a minute and slid it onto the headstock. You have to carefully squeegee it to make sure there are no air bubbles under it. Once dry it's just a matter of spraying lacquer over it and building up the finish. I didn't feel like this was "counterfeiting" since this was a true restoration of a real Strat neck and I wanted it to look as close to original as possible. Under close scrutiny you can tell it's not original but from more than a foot away it's darn hard to tell. The owner was blown away when he saw it. By the way the body was just as messed up as the neck was. The guitar was originally a hard tail. The owner had routed out a huge crater on the top of the guitar to accomodate an aftermarket tremolo unit. I routed and plugged the crater with a matching piece of ash, then routed the body for an authentic Fender vintage tremolo unit. I finished the body with a white lacquer to which I added just enough amber stain to make it look aged. Not bad if I do say so myself!