The Erickickocaster

Ron seems to have the uncanny ability to pick up interesting and exotic high end parts (came away in me hand guv) and this is no exception. A fully loaded EC scratch plate with lace sensor pickups, still with the film on it, suddenly appeared, and it has the original 25 dB active mid boost. Probably one of the prototypes, very likely given the source - ex guitar techs seem to have lots of hidden corners in their garages and sheds that every now and again elicit some wonderful sneaky gems. No money changed hands.

The donor body and neck for this was a nice placid blue Squier Strat in pretty good shape. Off it went to Denmark Street for the battery and board compartment route and then onto the bench for a fret dress. Lovely maple neck fitted the bill admirably. This was a guitar on a mission.

So we started playing around with it, It had a bit of a sharp V on the neck so we took it round to Seb, the man who really knows what he is doing, to thin down the profile a tad. We asked him what machine he used. He said patience and sandpaper. Well that told us.

From the fifty quid Strat project we had added some nice bits to the guitars, so we sort of de-added some of them before they left the nest on the rehoming project, and a nice set of staggered locking tuners ended up on the headstock. The headstock itself was a bit troublesome - spraying nitro in sub zero winter temperatures is not something i would recommend, so there were quite a few goes at it, the metalised decal pretty much dissolved so added in a black one but it turned out ok in the end and a lovely smooth feel to the back of the neck. Added the knocked up in the Shed decal so there was no denying its pedigree

Time for the electronics. We really didnt know what to expect, but the cavities were correct and all of the bits fitted together, a bit of head scratching on the wiring which we nearly got right, just no info on the battery on off so we ate a few batteries. So strung up ready to go. I plugged it in and did the usual turn all the knobs to full and hit the first chord.

After reseating the speaker coils in my lovely little shed amp, a Fender Super Sixty, Ron said, "i dont think you are supposed to do that" Turns out that these are actual controls that do proper things and change the sound, tone even, rather than the usual guitar knobs that just go from clean to muddy. The range is outrageous, you can do pretty much everything you need directly on the guitar in terms of tone and drive but you can kind of see why on the production models they tamed down the gain a bit as it's probably outputting something akin to mains voltage on the signal cable into the amp!

And so it was done we thought, a pretty neat job, nice guitar and one of our better attempts at the genre. But it then got taken a stage further. Ronnie ran into Charlie Chandler up at the Jeff Beck auction. He was spouting the wonders of his new Mark 4 Plek Machine (computerised levelling and fret dress all lasered up and super accurate). so Ronnie took a deep breath and off it went. I was intruiged to see the results, the guitar was pretty good before that stage.

Ron called me - "you gotta come play this buddy" and so i did and can categorically say this guitar is the nicest Strat i have ever had the pleasure of playing.