The Body

I'd bought the body about a month ago, after I'd decided that I wanted to do a Strat build.
I found a used AVRI (American Vintage Reissue) Strat body in Fiesta Red on Craigslist, but that ended up getting sold before I could snag it.
The guy who sold it ended up giving me a good deal on an Allparts body in Fiesta Red, and I began planning the type of build I would want.

Here's the body in Fiesta Red. It's a real beauty (although it's hard to express the true color since it looks different depending on the light, so I'll need to get some sunlight pictures soon).

The body is nice in that the routing is closer to vintage specs. The belly cut and the forearm cut seem to be deeper than some of the 70s body shapes, and I really like the deeper contours. The pickup routing is also more of a vintage style, and they support 3 single coils rather than the hum-single-hum routing they do on most bodies nowadays. Some people seem to think that the extra wood in the single-single-single routing contributes to better tone, but I'm not sure if that's true. However, I'll be using all single coils so this body will be absolutely perfect for what I want.

Stratocasters have changed a lot throughout the years, and the modern styles have some different specs/hardware than the vintage styles. In general, vintage Strats have 7.25 fretboard radius (which means the board is rounder) compared to the modern 9.25 radius (flatter, but not as flat as Gibson-style necks). Also, vintage bodies use a tremolo bridge with 6 screws rather than the modern 2 screws (the modern style supposedly has less friction for better tuning after using the trem). For me, since I come from playing humbucker + Tune-O-Matic guitars, I'm trying to have a more modern, playable guitar as my first Strat so that I can use it for recording music easier. If this build goes well, I might build another Strat, based on a more vintage spec somewhere down the line. But for the moment, I'll go with something easy to play as I transition over from the different guitar type that I'm used to.

I'll post some better pictures over the weekend once I get some nice sunlight to really show off the red color of the body.