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# Bdale's Custom Build of a Fender Stratocaster Clone #

For Christmas 2014, Robert and Elizabeth bought Bdale a beginner's guitar
book, and Robert offered to help with a guitar build project based on the
success of his Telecaster build.  This is the resulting project, Bdale's 
first guitar, started in February of 2015!

After a lot of reading and listening, a few core decisions got things rolling:

* build a "clone" of a hard-tail Fender Stratocaster (no tremolo)
* body and neck to be near-natural wood color with satin finish
* no pickguard (maximum exposed wood grain, rear control cavities
* pickups and all hardware in black
* standard strat-like 3-pickup, 1 volume, 2 tone design with 5-way selector
* second tone control with push-pull switch to phase-reverse middle pickup
* noise-reduced pickups

We had a "spare" blank in alder big enough to machine the body, left over
from Robert's Telecaster project.  So the plan was to machine a custom body
and buy the rest of the parts from various sources.

One of the reasons for going without pickguard is that it exposes more of
the natural wood grain to view.  A pleasant consequence is that the access
plate for the electronics will be on the back of the guitar, meaning it'll
be easy to pull the plate and tinker with the wiring without having to pull
the strings off... which, given I'm an electronics guy, might end up being
a really good thing!

## Part Selections ##

A period of intense study led to selecting 
[DiMarzio](http://dimarzio.com) Area pickups.  These are stacked-coil hum
reducing pickups in the standard strat single-coil pickup form factor.  The 
chosen "standard" set consists of:

* [Area 58](http://dimarzio.com/pickups/strat/hum-canceling-strat/area-58)
  for the neck position
* [Area 67](http://dimarzio.com/pickups/strat/hum-canceling-strat/area-67)
  for the middle position
* [Area 61](http://dimarzio.com/pickups/strat/hum-canceling-strat/area-61)
  for the bridge position

The rest of the parts were mostly obtained from 
[Guitar Fetish](http://www.guitarfetish.com/), with the exception of a nicer
[hard-tail bridge](http://guitarheads.net/products/bridges/hardtailrear.html)
sourced from [GuitarHeads.Net](http://guitarheads.net), and a 22-fret natural
Canadian maple neck purchased from eBay seller "bluelink88".

## Purchased Items ##

| Description | Part Number | Quantity | Price | Total |
|-------------|-------------|---------:|------:|------:|
|amazon.com|||||
|DiMarzio Area Pickup Set Black||1|229.99|229.99|
|ebay seller bluelink88|||||
|22-fret maple neck||1|35.99|35.99|
|guitarfetish.com|||||
|Push-Pull DPDT Pot 250K Audio|F20|1|8.79|8.79|
|Full Sized B250K Tone Pot|F22L|1|2.45|2.45|
|Full Sized A250K Volume Pot|F22A|1|2.45|2.45|
|USA Spec Stratocaster 5-Way Switch Black Tip|F158F164|1|11.45|11.45|
|Set of Three Black Strat Replacement Knobs|A27|1|4.95|4.95|
|Bag of BLACK Pickguard Screws|K60|1|6.45|6.45|
|Pair Classic Strap Buttons Black|K33|1|4.45|4.45|
|Black Vintage Spec. String Ferrules|K15|1|7.45|7.45|
|Strat Jack and Plate Black|K09|1|6.45|6.45|
|Strat Pickup Metal Trim Ring BLACK|K125|3|8.45|25.35|
|Pair Black Butterfly Strat String Trees|K36|1|5.45|5.45|
|Black Gotoh Style 14:1 tuners|E16|1|26.95|26.95|
|Ultra Thick Black Neck Plate with Screws|K03|1|9.45|9.45|
|guitarheads.net|||||
|black hard tail bridge||1|16.99|16.99|

## Body ##

I started out with a 1962 Stratocaster design file created in Alibre by
user protomachinst6 on CNCzone.

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/musical-instrument-design-and-construction/17659-cnc-32.html

I originally hoped that I would be able to use FreeCAD to modify this design,
but the STEP import process seemed to lose the ability to keep the various
sub-assemblies oriented correctly relative to each other.  Since Alibre has
been replaced by Geomagic Design, I pulled down a 15-day trial version of
that package to one of the Windows machines in the house, and (not 
surprisingly)it was able to read the file just fine.

Another interesting STEP file of the body from a 1962 strat drawn by Marc 
Erasmus is available on [GrabCAD](https://grabcad.com/library/62-strat-asm)
and it appears at least one person has actually built a guitar using these
files.

To build the guitar body I want, the existing body design file was 
modified to eliminate the tremolo cut-out and rear cavity, to add screw holes
for the hard-tail bridge, and to shift the electronics cavity from being
front-open to being rear-accessible with the front just having 3 holes for
the volume and tone control shafts and the slot and mounting screw holes
needed for the pickup selector switch.

The first attempt to cut the body on our CNC router failed, because a large
delivery of building materials happened in the middle of the roughing pass,
and I naively thought the router would be ok cutting for a while without 
me.  Apparently, swarf jammed the bit up enough to cause the machine to lose
steps and shut itself down.  Unfortunately, when I attempted to restart the
cut, something went horribly wrong and the roughing cutter put a deep gouge
through much of the body of the guitar.  I decided to call this attempt a
bust, and look for more wood to start over with.

## Wiring ##

A standard strat has a volume control, 2 tone controls, and a 5-way pickup
selector.  The pickup selector allows neck, neck+middle, middle, 
middle+bridge, and bridge as choices, with the combinations formed by
putting the two selected pickups in parallel.  The first tone knob controls 
the neck and middle pickups, the second controls the bridge pickup.

After lots of discussion with Robert and listening to many demo videos, the
only significant change to this I decided to make is to use a push-pull switch
variant of the second tone control, wiring it to allow phase reversing the 
middle pickup.  Phase reversing one pickup of a blended pair yields a "nasal" 
or "biting" tone.  Here is one of the 
[clearest demo videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIBHg4kwl2k)
I found of this effect.  What I like about this option is that it gives what
sounds to me like an old-school blues kind of tone.

The other minor tweak I'm considering is "treble compensation" on the volume
control, which DiMarzio shows in some of their wiring diagrams.  The idea is
to compensate for the usual loss of treble content when turning down the 
volume on the guitar.  It consists of an additional 560pF capacitor and 300k 
resistor in parallel between the hot and wiper terminals on the volume 
control.  This may or may not seem necessary once we have the guitar together.

## Artifacts ##

The following files are licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/):

* [FreeCAD](http://www.freecadweb.org/) design file for 
  [guitar body](guitarbody.fcstd)
* [STL output](guitarbody.stl) from FreeCAD for guitar body


More to come!