I’m putting together 5 left-handed strats for a customer, all of them with acrylic Hendrix portraits on them and all of them featuring a range of parts ranging from mid-priced down to dirt-cheap. The first two that I’m working on have bodies made from a wood that sometimes gets called ‘candlenut’. It’s soft, easily dented, fairly unattractive to look at and very very light. It’s probably just about the cheapest Strat body you can buy online anywhere at around £30 each. Many builders would scoff at such a cheap and nasty body – but as I recently made myself a strat with one and it’s currently my ‘go to’ guitar I’m not one of them.
The necks for all 5 of these strats are similarly-cheap Chinese left-handed ‘strat-style’ necks. The fret ends are a little sharp and some of the frets aren’t seated properly but overall they’re playable – as the neck on my recent blue build attests.
The biggest challenge is mating the necks to the bodies; they definitely aren’t made to fit together but with some modification I’m making it work. On the first 2 I’ve located and fitted the bridges (inexpensive HipShot copies), fitted the tuners, attached the necks and got the geometry right. Next stop, do the same neck / body fitting with guitars 3 and 4 which have nice quality Guitarbuild.co.uk swamp ash bodies and cheap Chinese necks and then spray all 4 with an acrylic satin topcoat.
A problem with strats 1 and 2 (the candlenut bodied ones) is that they’re very likely to be neck heavy because that wood is SO light. On my blue strat I’ve fitted lead in any / all the available space under the pickguard to rebalance things so that may be necessary on these two.
The Chinese necks came with right handed plastic nuts which went straight in the bin and have been replaced by Tusq nuts custom cut and filed to a very low and light 1st fret action. I’ve also shielded the cavities with conductive paint which will be grounded to make a ‘Faraday cage’ to reduce the amount of unwanted RF interference.
