Serial Number 020

Lego Stratocaster

Started on November 28, 2023: completed on December 13, 2023

*this guitar has been disassembled

The idea of building electric guitars had been on my mind for a while. I have tried to put together some DIY kit guitars and really, they aren’t bad for what you pay for. The only problem with those kits is the hardware and pickups.

I was considering to take the electric guitar building course at Hamm-Tone Guitars. My teacher, Jeremy Hamm, said that it was better to take the acoustic guitar building course before the electric guitar building course. Jeremy had told me that the guitar body would be of your own design which can let you be creative and come out with what you want instead of what is available.

I have been working with a person with a CNC machine that will be nameless at this point – I have asked if he wanted any credit for what he does for me but he wanted to stay anonymous. He does the CNC routing of the logos for me and we have talked about CNCing a guitar here and there.

With building the Stratocaster, I was looking to purchase a template set to route the body. For the same price, I could buy a CNC file and have the whole guitar routed with precision and consistency if I was looking to build a few. I ran this by him and it peaked his interest as well.

We purchased the CNC files and I glued a few pieces of 2×4’s together for some test cutting. For some reason the cuts for the cavities measured deeper than they should have. With this, a new CNC machine is being made – it was in “Rods” plans anyways but this pushed him to really get it going.

CNC guitars will be something in the future for Monkey Guitars: the only plans are Stratocaster and Les Paul bodies. As of right now, only a few guitars are planned to be made. It is actually because I had purchased a Fish Man loaded pickguard for a kit guitar Stratocaster but was never used in the end.

As for this Stratocaster build, the neck and body were purchased. The neck is carbon roasted flame Maple and the body is Candle Nut. I will say this about the Candle Nut: it is light but doesn’t feel very dense. This means that the sustain wouldn’t be very good – if you cared for that. But overall at this point, I am not very impressed with the wood.

Most newer Stratocasters use Alder for the body but reading up on the tonal qualities of it, I would look to use Basswood for the bodies instead and probably one with Mahogany. I believe I had a gentleman named Andrew that asked me if I can build a Stratocaster completely out of Mahogany.

SPECS

Body style Stratocaster

Scale 25.5″

Body Candle Nut

Neck carbon roasted flame Maple

Fingerboard Rosewood

Pickups Fish Man Fluence loaded pickguard

Bridge Gotoh 510T-FE2

Tuning Machines Gotoh 381 inline

Strings Ernie Ball 2223 Slinky