Gallery: http://imgur.com/a/OlSWI
I accumulated the components for this guitar over the course of several years, so the price was spread out over time. The final piece of the puzzle was the body which I won on an ebay auction earlier this year in March. I am glad that I was patient and waited for the best deals on the exact parts I wanted, rather than having to make any concessions or get price gouged by buying everything new or at once.
While I feel fairly accomplished and capable of doing my own guitar setups and basic luthiery work, I decided to pay for a pro to put it all together and do some of the trickier or tedious stuff (e.g. properly setting the neck and hardware; modifying the bridge post holes to fit the Mastery thimbles; properly and neatly shielding and grounding the interior wiring cavity and pickguard; doing a fantastic job with the electronics and wiring; installing a bone nut; getting the set-up and action absolutely perfect, etc.) If anyone happens to be in the Pittsburgh area, I can highly recommend Jason at Backstage Guitars in Lawrenceville -- he did a great job for a fair price.
Neck:
-Fender 60s Classic Player Strat neck
-Standard 25.5" scale-length
-Nice dark rosewood on quality maple
-Comfortable C-shape that has just the right amount of heft to it
-12" radius with 21 medium-jumbo frets
-Kluson vintage-style tuners
-Custom bone nut
-Mastery String Tree
Body:
-MJT one-piece swamp ash Jazzmaster body
-Transparent Surf Green finish in thin nitrocelluose with moderate wear pattern
-Light-weight -- fully assembled, the guitar weighs just a tad over 7lbs
Hardware:
-Mastery Bridge + inserts
-Mastery Tremolo
-Fender AVRI mint pickguard
-Black witch-hat knobs
-Schaller straplocks
-Strung w/10-gauge D'Addario strings
Electronics:
-Curtis Novak Widerange JM Humbuckers w/ chrome covers
-3 way pickup selector switch
-On/Off Kill Switch (in place of standard rhythm/lead circuit selector; no rhythm circuit vol/tone rollers)
-Master Volume, Master Tone w/500k potentiometers (this value seems to work much better for me than 1Meg in direct comparison)
-Switchcraft jack
-Top shelf cloth wiring, shielding and grounding
Sounds and Plays:
-Amazing and versatile. This will likely be taking over as my Number 1 instrument. The WR pickups really do an amazing job of retaining the clarity and wide EQ frequency response you'd expect from single coils, yet still gets the benefit of humbuckers: hum-canceling, increased output, and a smooth midrange compression. I still love standard JM single coils, but these provide an alternate voice that is every bit as useful.
There's only a couple more things I can think about adding to this project, and they are purely superficial changes:
-Change the neck decal to be Jazzmaster rather than stock Stratocaster
-maaaayyybee consider refinishing the neck in tinted nitro
-maybe consider distressing the rest of the guitar to match the body's patina. However, this will happen naturally over time.
-maybe consider different Vol/Tone knobs -- however I think Black seems to match the aesthetic
I'll try to make some time in the future to get a recording of it added to Youtube.
