Stratocaster Body Swap

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The new body.

After a year’s hiatus from playing electric guitar (I usually play fingerstyle pieces on my acoustic nowadays), I had rediscovered my baby blue Tanglewood Stratocaster, which was my first guitar. I had already modded it to the stage where not much of the original guitar remained. The bridge was replaced by a MiM Fender one, the tuners are now retro-style Washburn tuners, and similarly the pickups have also been long since replaced by some nice “Warman” pickups made by a bloke in Wales.

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The old Tanglewood guitar in baby blue.

The two most critical remaining pieces are of course the neck and the body. I quite like the maple neck on this guitar and have no reason to replace it, however, the body is cheap, light balsa-wood, finished with a thick, plastic-feeling paint job. Also the colour is just terrible!

So I hatched my plan: after spending too long on YouTube, getting jealous at new Fender Strats, I decided to finally cure my blues by more modding. Specifically, after a bit of surfing eBay, I bought a replacement body for my Partscaster for €180. It is a two-piece alder body and has this fantastic wine-burst finish, which as far as I know, was available for a short run from Fender in the mid 90s, but nothing outside of the custom shop since.

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2-piece Alder body in wine-burst finish.

It was a fairly simple operation to swap out the body, though there were some niggles. Firstly, the neck didn’t exactly fit into the body, so the neck carving needed a bit of sanding to make for a snug fit for the neck. The other annoyance was that the screw holes on the body weren’t exactly straight (and neither was the neck), this meant that the neck is two or so degrees off-centre, also requiring that the bridge be also slightly off kilter, which is visible in the first picture.

If I had received such a guitar from the Fender factory, I would be quite annoyed, but having a slightly wonky bridge is fine on this mash-up guitar, it might even give me it some sentimental value…

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Back of the new wine-burst strat.

Overall, the guitar still plays great and I don’t notice the off-centre bridge when the strings are on it anyway. I am quite pleased with this latest mod and would encourage anyone else to have a go as well, if they have any knock-off strats lying around.