80's Japanese Fender Stratocaster Restoration

This ace 80's Japanese Fender Stratocaster was brought in as the customer wanted the original neck to be refurbished so it could be used with the body again.
The neck was removed with the screws fully tightened at some point in it's life, causing a lot of damage to the neck. The customer had glued the cracks himself, but the neck needed a full refret before it could be playable again.
The customer also wanted a roller nut fitted along with locking tuners which he purchased due to his tremolo heavy playing style.
Details and photos of the restoration is below!

The first step was removing the old frets, this is a precision job to ensure none of the aged lacquer chips away when the frets are removed. The slots are then prepped removing the older glue residue.

We refret guitars using traditional methods, as taught to us at Totnes School of Guitar Making. The technique of hand hammering in the frets allows very precise control over how the frets are seated. This was vital with this refret, as due to how the neck had been mistreated, the wood of the fret slots was starting to rot, causing the frets to spring up. Special work had to be done to the tang of each fret to ensure the frets remained seated correctly

Once the frets had been installed, the frets were leveled using our two stage fret leveling process, before the frets were recrowned and hand polished to a high shine.

The body had been resprayed in the past, we forgot to take a before picture, but you can see the thickness of the paint that had to be carefully removed to allow the original neck to sit back in it's neck pocket. Sadly someone had already tried to remove a section of the overspray, and pulled off the paint along a section of the side of the pocket. The wasn't really anything we could do with one edge, except tidy it up the best we could.

The roller nut was then installed, carefully marking out how much neck material needed to be removed to allow the wider nut to sit in the neck. 
This was all done by hand to allow precise installation of the roller unit.
The install was made more challenging due to the fact this was am 80's Japanese neck, so the nut slot was deeper than the more modern strats that the roller nut was designed to fit.
Custom shims were made and installed to allow the action at the nut to be tweaked with the metal shims supplied with the unit, during the guitar setup process.

The neck complete, it was installed onto the body for trial stringing. Sometimes working with vintage guitars and modern parts, there is compatibility issues which need to be overcome. With this guitar, the roller nut was a different radius than the neck, the neck being 9.5" and the roller 12". This lead to uncomfortable action due to the different radius. 
The solution was a second precise level of the neck, while the neck was under tension, with the goal of removing the high part of the center of the frets. This was possible due to the brand new frets having a lot of crown height, and our fret leveling process preserves as much of the fret height as possible. Although this isn't an ideal solution, it was the only one possible that would give the customer what he wanted, as a fingerboard reprofile on a vintage neck wasn't within budget, nor would it preserve the originality of the neck.
The pictures above show the neck once it was fully finished and ready for restring and setup. 

Once the guitar was reassembled, the whole guitar had a detail clean, before being restrung and setup ready for the customer to enjoy!