Stratocaster, was the dream guitar for every electric guitar player, at least of my age…
Let’s build a Strat…Along with Nick Pavlakis, we started tweaking and redesigning this classic shape, which was mandatory for this built. We want an instrument build for lead roles, we like Hi-gain, we like distortion, we didn’t want tremolo for this guitar and we want to be able to use any type of bending.
Wood Selection
The Neck.
Before I build the neck, I made two restrictions; I didn’t want to use the traditional placement of the truss rod (from the back of the hand), because I didn’t want to spoil the multi layered back view of the neck (7ply maple-wenge). Furthermore, I wanted to keep the front of the headstock plain, with no visible plies of wenge and without the truss rod bolt. So I decided that I will build the neck on the vertical as well as in the horizontal axis, by combining a beam of 7ply (maple-wenge) and a beam of pure maple. As a standard Strat neck, needs at least 19.4mm width, both those beams will represent and
of the total width accordingly. The truss rod, will be adjusted from the neck pocket side. The fretboard is made of pure black ebony, with mother of pearls inlays and 10’’ radius. Dimensions of the neck will be standard, apart from the scale, where we are going to use 25’’ instead of the standard 25.5’’. We will do so, to achieve easier bendings (we talked about that before) and in order to have less string tension, therefore a Higher dynamic range and signal to the pick-ups (something like the behaviour of a les Paul).
The Body.
The body will be standard Strat shaped. We will not put a pick guard and we will not route for tremolo. The only holes, will be for the pic-ups. The wood will be African mahogany for the main body and a 10mm top of wenge. The total thickness will be 43mm.
The Hardware.
- Tuners: Schaller M6 18:1 Velvet-Tec™
- Nut: Graph Tech tusq
- Neck radius: 10 inches
- Bridge: Schaller Hannes® bridge
- Pickups: DiMarzio Titan™ Neck and Bridge
- Frets: Sintoms Pyramid Shape 2,5 x 1,2 R1,0 – 18%
- Switch: Schaller Megaswitch P 5way + 1volume
Here I have to say that this guitar was an idea incepted by our philosophy of sustainability. The actual guitar was built copying the V7 wood pattern and the actual neck of the Strat, with the addition of the maple beam on top, was the waste of the V7 neck. We used the same woods on a different environment, Bolton instead of neck-through, to see how they perform and whatactual differences will occur in the tone, because of the shape, scales, pick-ups, construction methods etc.
Pavlakis musical instruments 