I've known this 1977 Fender Stratocaster for a long time. My good friend Joe bought this one about 30 years ago in the current state it's in below. It had the typical vintage 80's makeover with a set of Bill Lawrence L-220 pickups, single volume and tone controls, Schaller tuners and lots of brass(bridge, knobs & jack plate) - the nut was miraculously spared.
This was Joe's main guitar for over twenty years until he picked up a '58 Les Paul reissue a few years back and the Strat ended up becoming a wall hanger. The main issue being that there was almost no tonal variation with the current setup. My advice was to turn it back into a vintage sounding Strat again, and the best place to start was with a new set of pickups. So I opened it up to see what I was dealing with and found out that everything needed to be replaced. The fourth position on the switch didn't work at all and the pots were horrible.
I picked up a set of Fender Custom Shop Texas Special Pickups, three CTS 250K audio taper pots, an 022mf 250V tone cap, 5-way switch, three Fender knobs and got to work wiring it up vintage style.
Next I cleaned up the frets and rosewood fingerboard with some lemon oil and #0000 steel wool, put on a new set of Ernie Ball Super Slinky strings, and set the intonation and action.
I adjusted the truss rod and tightened the neck plate screws, removed two of the tension springs from the back of the vibrato assembly as three are enough to do the job, and also added a spare plastic back plate that I had lying around.
And here it is a Stratocaster again. The ash body has a nice grain pattern and the guitar now looks and sounds amazing. The only other things I would still suggest are a reissue bridge, chrome jack plate and three layer pickguard.
Joe is quite happy with the results and says the new setup sounds great.
