It's a 1986 AVRI '62 strat from the days before AVRIs were even called AVRIs. There were a number of reasons I was excited to get my hands on it, but one of the big ones was that it has a clear '86 pencil date on the neck (my birth year). When I turned 30, I developed a bit of an obsession with finding the right birth-year guitar. My initial attempt was a sunburst MIJ strat, but for a number of reasons I just didn't bond with it. Next attempt was a G&L SC-3, which played and sounded amazing, but looked kinda awkward to me. It was a solid flat red (body, neck, and headstock) with black plastics and no pickguard, and just wasn't my style. I held on to it for a couple of years but never really played it much, so I moved it on.
Realizing that the romantic notion of a birth-year guitar wasn't translating into any kind of bond with those guitars, I stopped actively looking for them. I had a Reverb search saved for '86 Fenders that I would occasionally glance at, but I kinda decided that the only '86 guitar I'd really want would be a Jaguar or Jazzmaster, and those were already stupidly overpriced at AVRI prices and beyond, and listings rarely confirmed a specific year of manufacture anyway. It was usually just based off the first letter of the Fender Japan serial number, which often only narrowed things down to a 2-3 year range.
Then, HNB posted this strat, and he and I got talking about trades. Since he pulled it apart, he had confirmation that it was an actual '86. And since it was an early US reissue, it had a nitro finish that showed its age. Beyond that, even - this guitar was played hard in its previous life, and would be marketed as a "heavy relic" if someone replicated it. My favourite thing about pre-'68 Fenders and 80's G&Ls is that the nitro has had time to sink into the wood of the neck. If you've played one of those guitars, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Well, this guitar has all that and more. It's got spots in the neck that have been rubbed down to the wood (along with that lovely grey oxidation of the maple that lets you know it happened naturally and a long time ago). It's got checking everywhere. It's got a crumbling logo and a missing Contour Body decal and buckle rash on the back that is down to the wood. Basically everything you'd expect on a pre-CBS Fender that had actual stories to tell.
Oh, and it was Lake Placid Blue, my longtime obsession and favourite Fender Custom Colour. So that was it for me. I had found my birth year guitar at last!
Cue to the part where I actually played the thing. I was instantly reminded of why I kept trying acquiring strat-style guitars and letting them go - my years (decades now) of playing Offsets made the strat bridge feel claustrophobically close to both the pickguard and the volume knob. My picking hand would just feel awkward. And then there was my longstanding bias against strats. They were the basic bitches of the Fender world, the boomer guitar, the one that everyone played Clapton and Hendrix licks on while they babbled clichés about how nobody makes good music anymore and played hacky pentatonic riffs. I started out on a strat as my first electric, but saved up for and bought a Jaguar at 16 that led me nearly exclusively into the world of Offsets for the better part of two decades.
The actual guitar played so well, but that still "just" made it a nice strat. So I kept halfheartedly posting it for sale or trade, never bothering to take nice photos of it or put effort into actually moving it. Twice, I had cash or trade offers that were surprisingly appealing, but both times I chickened out and took the ad down for months afterward.
So what changed in the last year and a half? Well, for one, my acceptance that I love Gibsons. What does that have to do with a strat? However much bias I had against strats, I had ten times as much baggage when it came to Gibsons. They were the anti-Offsets. They were revolting to me. They were like lightning rods for toxic masculinity and hard rock, they were for playing songs about wanting to fuck your teacher or comparing women to cherry pies.
Except they aren't. They're just guitars. My 13 year-old brain had done what 13 year-old brains do - turning everything into a team sport and then fusing that team with my identity. Offsets were my "team Edward" or whatever the fuck other team kids decide to center their world around. And thus, my discovery that I really fucking love Flying Vs made me look at this strat with new eyes and new ears.
New ears? Well, yeah, actually. I had gotten into a bit of an amp rut in recent years where, to combat choice paralysis on my Kemper and then even more so on my AxeFX, I had come to use the same amp model as the basis for all my patches. The problem was that I had really dialed in the tone for my Jaguars, so the more un-Jaguar-like a guitar sounded, the less I tended to like it. When I first plugged in this strat, the pickups in it just sounded so shrill, and the bridge pickup in particular was just completely unusable to me without a tone control.
My Gibsons sounded like shit, too, at first. And in fairness, some of them did come with humbuckers that were overwound to hell. But they got me to break out of that rut and explore new amp models again, which of course led to me finding some really great tones. When I took the same approach for this strat, I had the same result. Better, even. I hadn't realized just how much I missed playing on the neck pickup of a strat. It was the tone that got me onto "team Fender" in the first place, specifically what John Frusciante did with it.
So, ever since I dialed in some amp tones specifically geared to the neck pickup on this guitar, I can't put the thing down. And playing it as much as I have got me over that hump where the bridge and volume knob felt awkward and claustrophobic. I guess I regained the "strat technique" or muscle memory that I hadn't used since I was 16. It's definitely the best strat I've ever played, which I guess I've known subconsciously this whole time given how I kept sabotaging my own efforts to get rid of it.
And now the fun part: photos and spec/mod discussions!
I took those outside on our last warm day of the year because it's hard to capture the wear accurately in indoor lighting, but I think the photos make it look more saturated and teal than it does in person. It normally looks like this, which is closer to a traditional LPB:
The thing is, it's not actually Lake Placid Blue. If you look at the buckle wear on the back of the guitar, you can see that it's actually a silver undercoat with a blue top coat, which would make this a candy finish like CAR. CAB maybe? Lake Placid Candy Blue? In any case, LPB has the metallic flakes integrated with the colour coat, and the difference is definitely noticeable in person. This guitar has a deeper quality to the finish, while my LPB Jaguar looks flatter but dances more under the light. This is the type of thing that would spawn a 50-page thread if they did it on an AVII, but in 1986 the Corona plant had just opened and I guess they were still figuring out how to replicate the details of the original guitars. It's more of a cool historical footnote to me than anything else - I don't think too many people have dissected how these early reissues were finished.
Fortunately, they seemed to have gotten the clear lacquer down more accurately than the LPB - the neck feels just like the '64-'66 Mustangs and Jaguars I've owned, and the way the body checked looks totally right.
So, now that I've decided that it's a keeper, I've been thinking about how I plan to mod it. Six years ago, when I first bought that sunburst MIJ '86 strat, I had decided that I wanted to make it more vintage accurate, so I bought some parts that might end up on this one now. First up was a true celluloid mint repro from Lashing Guitars. Those guys went sort of all-out getting the material and colour correct, and I bought mine right before they ran out of stock. I haven't seen them for sale since, and I've kept it through all the years I had no strat at all, just because I knew I'd never find one again. I'll probably make a separate thread where I pull it out and put it side by side with my other mint and white pickguards. The thing the photos can't really convey is the tactile element. It just feels entirely different from a plastic guard, and reflects way less light as well.
Next up will be the pickups. I originally found three 50's Musicmaster/Duosonic pickups in the 6k+ range that I planned to load into this guard and pair with an Ilitch noise-canceling backplate, but frustratingly, I can't find the backplate anywhere. We've moved three times since I bought it, and while I managed to keep the pickups and pickguard safe, the backplate is MIA to the point that I've accepted that I must have put it in a box that got lost or stolen during one of the moves. So now, I'm not sure whether to buy another backplate (they weren't cheap in 2016 and they're even less cheap now!), or just buy some Kinmans for it.
I never use anything but the neck or bridge position anyway, so I'm thinking of cheaping out and just installing two new pickups and a 3- or 4-way switch, leaving the middle position disconnected and just lowering it down out of the way as far as it'll go. Kinmans have unique (taller) covers, though, so I may have a difficult time getting the middle pickup cover to match. I kinda wish I could just buy three of the same cover and skip the colour-matching step, because I'm definitely not interested in paying $150 or whatever for a new middle pickup I'll never use.
Conversely, I don't know if I can shell out the $300 USD it would cost to replace the lost backplate while the back of my mind is still going, "It's got to be around here somehwere!".
I've also been kicking around the idea of replacing the middle pickup with a dummy coil, since I don't use it anyway, but in my experience you definitely lose more treble that way compared to either the Ilitch system or Kinmans. It would be cheap and easy though - just grab an import ceramic strat pickup, pull the bar magnets off the bottom, and wire it to a volume knob if you're feeling fancy.
There are also the Mojotone Quiet Coil pickups, which totally nail the inductance and frequency response of vintage strat pickups (OSG member Antigua did an amazing analysis). Cheaper than Kinmans, but harder to find in stock outside of complete sets, and buying three Quiet Coils is no cheaper than buying the two Kinmans I'd actually want to wire up anyway. I do like that they're essentially constructed like strat-sized Firebird pickups, since I love Firebirds and can see how moving the magnets closer together and winding them to the inductance of strat pickups might end up sounding a whole lot like a strat pickup.
Plus, I still plan to buy two more sets of Kinmans for my Jaguar and Mustang, and those are based on their strat pickups, so I figure it might be nice to get some variety. Nobody else really makes noiseless pickups in proper Jag and Mustang form factors, and that'll put me at 4 total sets of Kinmans not counting the strat, so I'm running out of strat models that appeal to me. I know Mustangs and Jaguars sound different innately, but the idea of buying $600 worth of identical pickups for two different guitars doesn't sit so well. Then again, Kinman has impressed me twice already, so I know they'd sound great. The Mojotones would be more of a gamble.
Back to the guitar itself...I'll leave you with a parting thought - this guitar is older today than the very first stratocasters were when it rolled off the line. Pretty wild to think about, but it wears its age well, I think. It certainly feels like as authentic a vintage guitar as any '54 could have been back in '86.
Like a lot of folks, I'm not thrilled with the volume knob placement, either, but I've learned to adjust.
