Basically it is a cheap Hondo with a crappy hand painted camo no serial number (odd). It is playable but it is humming and stays in tune for just about one second. The neck is fat and boring. The frets are really low so bending is hard. Over all, a piece of crap.
For some while I have nurtured a dream to build a custom experimental strat. I really want the classic sounds that comes with them. I also really want a killswitch (Buckethead-style) but I certainly don't need a trem-system so I am going for a non-trem strat bridge. I own a Fender Lead I and a Parker and wish to keep them in original shape so I decided to use at least the body of the Hondo and build a custom strat with used parts from Ebay.
So the first step is to strip it down and to see what is usable:
Unfortunateley the close up of the neck hole reveals that the tree is laminated, I'm afraid that the body is acoustically dead. Or am I wrong?
The cavity for the spring and pickups also reveal there is no electric insulation so I will have to either paint them with conductive paint or use conductive film. Otherwise the body seems to be fit. I will use chemical paint remover together with lots of aceton to get rid of the old paint/lacquer. The next step is determined when I have a better understanding of what the body material is like.
I'm currently bidding on cheap Chinese made strat-neck with med/jumbo-frets.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&item=380129102135
The idea is to have locking tuners together with the non-trem bridge. Anyone done something similar?
