first things first....

right then, Zappa guitar deco on the bucket list, but first things first. Been busy over the dark months with mixing up and updating as well as facelifting some of the guitars and I'm currently faced with a guitar body that I purchased back in 2009 which deserves a quality rebuild as it used to be one of my favourite guitars but has now had parts removed for greater projects.

the body is an aged olympic white (more vanilla) 62RI , weighing in at 3lbs 15 oz. So for a few weeks I've been looking around for a neck I'd be happy about to join up on this project. There have been some really nice necks up for sale but unfortunately the price tags have been out of the budget for this one and none of the necks had that "something" that I need to convince me to take the plunge..
..until this one came up.

Was rather surprised this hadn't been snapped up. really nice looking piece of maple. the other pictures revealed the varnish on the back of the neck had been played off , so the neck had a classic relic appearance which normally costs top dollar to buy if it hasn't been done naturally.

obviously before I buy anything I make sure I do some research.
So, this came off one of Dan Smiths era oddities in 1983, the American Fender Elite Strat.
reading through some reviews, there appears to be several owners of these guitars who swear by them. Personally I'm not too keen on the look of these guitars, but this neck caught my attention , especially with it's rather unusual neck profile , a 12" radius wide and shallow neck.

really keen on this project.

Grabbed the original tuners as well: