# 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
* 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.

Another intense period of study led to the decision to use 
[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".

| Description | Part Number | Quantity | Price | Total |
|-------------|-------------|---------:|------:|------:|
|black hard tail bridge||1|16.99|16.99|

More to come!