CityCaster-#007
Strat

I was commissioned to build a Strat Ultra... Kind of.
A Strat Ultra, with the neck specs of a Telecaster from 1968 and the body of a Stratocaster, with a Gilmour/Strat sound, Steinberger tuners, etc...

I happened to have the PDF of a strat ultra and the future owner measured the neck elements that were of importance for the neck shape.
I ordered some flamed maple from Delta-Bois and started to work on the neck... It took me two [:-(] to get it right as the first neck I completed nevertheless was not perfectly aligned between front and back... Something wrong in my files before I CNC'ed the neck shape... my fault, and a reminder to double, triple check before carving wood...

I wanted to order parts from Lace Sensor, but not only their prices are high but what killed it is they take 3 months for delivery! So it will be an EMG active Guilmour PU series, fully assembled and delivered by Thomann along with Steinberger tuners, in just a few days, for ½ the cost!

Neck-head transition

I like/prefer to carve the head and heel  -neck transitions by hand, I find it pleasant and a lot easier to adjust to the body and situations. Such as in the present case, where I started to work with pure stratocaster spec files and was asked to adjust a few things such as nut width to different specs. Working these by hand enable incomparable flexibility...

Frets and neck heel

Moving along with the neck, I mounted the neck to the body to mark the heel junction and started carving the transition from neck to heel using rasps and sand paper. Once done and I was happy with the result, I worked on fretting the neck with 2.4mm frets, as requested by the future owner. Frets were positioned, pressed in using my hand press, and leveled using my home-made leveling jig with 150 and 300 paper grit. I cleaned the neck from any residue, protected the fretboard with bule tape and went on to fret crowning, leveling and polishing, verifying at each step I didn't have any fret standing higher than its neighbor ones. Overall the neck is pretty nice, feels good to the left hand, and is dead flat!

Body work!

I adjusted the position of the bridge according to scale length and dry-fitted everything to ensure all would be in place. I also drilled a small channel for the  bridge ground wire to the pre-assembled pickguard. With the bridge in place, I used my drill press to drill 4mm holes through the body for string mounting and drilled from the back of the body larger (6.5mm) holes for string ferrules to be installed after the body is finished.
I unmounded everything and started to play with colors... I just received water-soluble pigments in several colors and asked the future owner what he'd like as a color for his guitar. Blue (or some kind of blue) it will be.
I mixed pigments with OSMO Poly-X oil and used this as a first base coat for the body. The neck will remain natural except for the head stock which will be the same color as the body. As the coats build up, the color will get more present, maybe darker too, I will adjust the pigment mixing accordingly to keep that "blue-jean blue" like color as vivid as possible, with the mapple curls showing through.

Right after the 3rd oil/pigment coat: