Buying a Fender Stratocaster on eBay?

If you are looking for a vintage Fender Stratocaster, eBay is probably worth a browse. Many famous guitar players favoured the Strat, so why not try to get this distinguished guitar for a bargain-basement price?

The name Fender Stratocaster is a little bit misleading because these two words can mean many things to many guitar players. The first thing that experts will tell you is that the Stratocaster is just one of the many Fender guitars that guitarist George Harrison played. The Strat, along with the Gibson Jagger and the Gibson Les Paul, was designed by Leo Fender, president of Fender guitars.

The Stratocaster had its humble beginnings in 1954 and was a product of the international guitar battle in the 40s. The Strat was originally known as the Esquire and had a lower bridge pickup. In the late 40s, Fender tailored the Strat with a new set of pickups and renamed the guitar Stratocaster.

You might be surprised that the name Stratocaster is still used today by Fender, rather than the more modern name, Telecaster. The Strat, along with the Telecaster and the Jaguar, were the first Fender guitars to use a solid body construction.

The Stratocaster has a number of unique attributes that set it aside from other guitars. Its body is made from either poplar, alder or ash wood; the neck is most often maple, but in the past guitars have been made from a variety of different woods. The fretboard is usually made of rosewood or ebony and the frets are set in a rosewood fingerboard.

Of course, the Stratocaster is known for its unique sound and this is unaffected by the wood in which it is made. The pickups used by Fender do not have EQ controls so if you need them you will need to know how to fine-tune them.

The Stratocaster’s design was considered groundbreaking and completely different from the Gibsons and Martins of the time. It consisted of three sections which were a Hybrid Strat, a body and neck of solid pieces of wood with Humbuckers which provided the important treble tone. There was a new design in which the bridge was adjustable and sit except was the neck offset by about fifteen degrees and had to be set eighteen inches from the fretboard.

47 guitars were initially shipped, although it took six months to get the issues plugged up. All guitars had to be painstakingly replaced, because of the high Rodney eagle ray and the strings were reinforced where necessary.

The Fender salesperson said it just happened that some of them were harder to get than others. How true this was!

Two issues were holding up the guitars and had to be solved before they could be delivered again. The Fix-It-Here Bass Guitar had a truss rod that was getting loose. Fender had introduced a neck between the neck plate and the main body which was considered an improvement. The Bigsby vibrato was also incoherent. Fender started using thebaBeystudyoo to replace the glue in the bridge and the guitar was re-made.

The Fenderbers took the guitars to the owner’s instruction and some also took to the substandard wood in the used guitars and ended up burning the guitars at the factory. The company tried to send every guitar under its brand to the Hong Kong factory and more than 150 were destroyed or returned to Fender..

The demand was very high for these destroyers and within two years from the time of their manufacture, 80% of the guitars were destroyed. A lot of these guitars ended up in the hands of individuals who propositioned Fender about purchasing them. Plenty of older Fenders also ended up in the hands of collectors.

The Fender salesperson stated that these guitars are actually quite popular and that people still buy them up to this day. I had to admit I had never seen one actually played and that really impressed me.

This is an epic find for any Fender fan or collector! Billy Gibbons knows a little about guitars and this is one that you may want to learn more about. You have had a very unfortunate experience with a Fender guitar in my company and may wish to avoid that happening to you as well.

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