Is this '62 Strat genuine and all original?

[Music] Wow this guitars awesome my friend Tom brought this 1962 Fender Stratocaster in for a reef Rhett he picked it up from the second owner who got it from a guy who won it new in a radio station contest out west back in 1962 how awesome is that especially a vintage one this guitar is rumored to have been refinished at some point and was priced as such any time you have a refinished instrument that brings up questions of the originality of the rest of the instrument often times things are changed pickups might be swapped out pots or whatever and all of that has a continuing negative effect on the value of the instrument and so Tom's no vintage expert he asked me if I would go ahead and just give it a thorough going-over to make sure that all the parts and everything else on this guitar are indeed original to this instrument so I like to start at the peghead this is the spaghetti logo that fender used from 54 up till 1966 when the transition from fender to CBS took place the bushings look correct string tree looks correct I'm going to check under the D string tuner cuz that'll tell me a little bit about the age of the clues on Clues on during this period had a single line down the back which said Clues on deluxe sin stamped into it and on the underside of the tuners there should be a patent number and there it is d 169 400 another little interesting thing about this shot is you see that hole right there that little hole it is an indexing hole that secured the neck blank to the template when they did the shaping there's another one on the heel when I look at the finish on the back of the peghead I see some like bubbles like trapped air that didn't make itself out if you move down the neck a little bit you see these weird little melted spots where it was probably hanging on a stand with some kind of rubber tubing or whatever on it and that melted into the finish so and ya see the front has a different look to it the color is even different you know the decals sitting up on the finish like you'd expect to see it so if I had to guess about the back the owner of the guitar at one point wanted to see if he could get this melted spot of the lacquer repaired and the person who did the work at the time just probably over sprayed it one interesting thing here a difference in the checking pattern if you look at all the checking on the top it's like long and continuous but if you look at it in the cutaways it's like kind of chunky I'm guessing they didn't get all of that finish out of there and that they just sprayed this black over what would be the dark edge of the sunburst and that's why it checked like that they didn't reshape the contours or anything so it all looks pretty solid let me go ahead and take the strings off moving down to the bridge we see a real well-worn piece these old Fender saddles from 54 to around 71 said fender and then had a patent pending stamp on them and it used to be real easy to scope out the reissues or the replicas because they said fender fender here's an example of the fender fender saddle these would have been used on all the reissues up until probably just a couple years ago now they do make a reissue fender patent-pending saddle but they're really clean so if you look really close you'll see that's the word patent pending is actually into the string through hole there so it's the easiest way to spot these from the replica pieces the strap buttons do look original this one's kind of funny though if you look real close there you're gonna see a drywall screw and then when I look at this one it's not a drywall screw but you'll look and you'll see a flathead screw so that one's obviously been replaced too it's not uncommon for these strap buttonholes to strip out so pretty frequently I'll see the wrong screw stuck in there all right we'll look at the serial number here which during this period would have been on the neck plate eighty nine thousand two hundred in nineteen sixty two the Stratocaster serial numbers ranged from seventy two thousand to ninety three thousand so this checks out so far I'm liking what I'm seeing here all of this hardware appears to be original to the guitar which is awesome looking at all the plastic parts pree 57 Stratocasters the covers are stark white knobs or stark white and the shape is actually different they're actually kind of rounded off a little bit and the knobs are a little taller post 57 they're squared off more just kind of a sharper look all the way around the pickguard looks correct it's celluloid which is prone to shrinking and if you look really close here you can see that a lot of the screws don't line up with the holes perfectly this one's in amazingly good shape though usually you'll see them and they'll be broken in a couple places usually right across here and then the space between the adjustment screw and the edge of the pit guard is usually broken there the moment of truth we're gonna take this guard off and see what we see under there we might see replaced components we might see routes who knows here we go all right Oh check it out the person that did the reef in on this masked off the cavities so what we're seeing in the bottom here is the original sunburst finish that's pretty cool I'm looking at all the joints and stuff it looks like we're pretty good pickups are what we would expect to see here black backs no stamping or signatures or dates or anything on there and I flip them over and look at the tops they have the chamfered pull pieces it's not just a straight rod that it's actually the corners broken on those so that is correct for this era as well tape is intact solder joints look remarkably intact they look like they have not been touched it seems a little weird to me that these joints don't seem to be touched even though the guitar was clearly refinished I want to take a look at the jack to see if it offers any insight on the solder joints in the control cavity it's flat and not it's not like a bulbous solder like you saw inside the cavity looking close at the lugs on the jack it does look like the original joints have been broken at some point I'm going to take a quick look at the tremolo cavity now take the cover off the string claw cover does look correct and then we're looking at that solder joint I'm looking to see if the solder joint of the string ground has also been broken into claw and it clearly has from the factory it would have been kind of a blob you know and once you put heat on it and especially trying to heat up that steel claw in order to attach solder to it you got to really heat it up a lot so what this tells us is that the connections were unsoldered at the jack and at the string claw so they could remove the pickguard without having to unsolder any of the rest of the electronics the person who did the work probably didn't realize it at the time but I commend whoever did the work for leaving the main control cavity intact okay the last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take the neck off so we can just check out the heel stamp very evidence of all sorts of weird shims and stickers that other indexing holes printed right around there I think alright looking at the date a lot of folks think that the first number is the day of the month that the guitar was built but what that actually indicates is the specific model that it was and in this case during this period of time number two meant it was a Stratocaster or maybe even a jazz master which had two similar neck to it at the time there's a whole list of the different names so that is not the date that's actually indicates that this neck was going on a Stratocaster then you have the date October October 62 and then B stands for the width of the neck I'm thinking this is the neck that came on okay Tom as you knew going into it this strat has been refinished but luckily the job is really good and it looks at home on this guitar and what's super cool is all the parts and electronic components with the exception of a couple screws appear to be the same ones that the guitar left the factory with so that's awesome you've got a player grade strat and I can't wait to get it refriended and back in your hands information on all these little tidbits whether it's serial numbers or tuners can be found in a variety of resources there's a lot of books about fender and the Stratocaster you can find this information in there a lot of incredible information online guitar HQ comm which is particularly resourceful check all that stuff out you learn a lot about the instruments that you have if you like what you saw in this video and any of our other videos subscribe to our YouTube channel because we've got a lot more where this came from

Channel: StewMac

Views: 407,613

Keywords: guitar repair, guitar building, guitar making, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, classical guitar, diy, how to, dan erlewine, trade secrets, luthier, lutherie, fretboard, fingerboard, stringed instruments, mandolin, banjo, electric bass, bass guitar, Dan erlewine, stewmac, erick coleman, fender, stratocaster, vintage guitar, 1962 strat, originality check, stewmac_guitar, heystewmac

Id: jnfEuEasbII

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2019