So one day I got the itch to have a twangy Stratocaster added to my guitar line up and I went hunting on the internet. After about 3 weeks of searching on eBay and craigslist.org, and reading that these are really good guitars, in fact some say too good. This Fender Squire series took down 23% of the USA Fender Stratocasters sales in 1996 so Fender USA decided to quit the production.

The insiders know this and since then they are very sought after by collectors and players. This one has a solid ash body, maple neck with rosewood fret board, 21 frets, 3 very good sounding single coils.

Here is a link to the reviews of the Squire Pro Tone at HarmonyCentral.com.

I came across this damaged Squire Pro Tone by Fender in a red translucent thick poly coat with gold hardware. Fender put these Squire Pro Tones out from 1996 - 1998 and took them off the shelves around 1999 because they were cutting into real American Fender Stratocaster sales (not Squire).

The reason I come to find is that they cut into the sales of US Fenders was because these Squire ProTone Series were such good guitars. With Gold plated steel hardware, large pots, Fender stamped steel string saddles, full tem block, alnico 2 pickups and most of all, Ash Wood body! Some people thought they were even better then the American made Fender Stratocaster of the time.

From wikipedia: Pro-Tone Series
The pro-tone series of stratocasters was produced between 1996 and 1998 and featured a solid ash body, a 1-piece maple neck, and three single-coil alnico pickups. The Pro-Tone line was manufactured in Korea (many in the Cort factory).

It was available in a handful of finishes: vintage blonde, crimson red, black, three-tone sunburst, trans sapphire blue, and olympic white. The crimson red, and trans sapphire blue finishes came with gold hardware. There was a special edition Pro-Tone called the 'Fat Strat' which came in black with a black painted headstock, 22 frets, a bridge humbucker, and a Floyd Rose double locking tremolo.

All I can say so far, they are all right! At first site it didn't look too bad, two areas on the body needed to be sanded down and a crack need to be repaired, and both blemishes were on the outer wood of the body.

As I continued to examine the newly acquired Strat Project, I realized the need to take off the hardware and clean everything up!

Then another idea hit me, why not give it a relic job or road worn look like the new line up from Fender? It's settled, that's what I'll do! My work was cut out for me but the best was yet to come! Before getting started I cleaned up the two side cracks and paint chips on the body before any work was preformed.

From there I was going to try and 60 grit sandpaper the paint down by hand to a more natural “Road Worn” look. But the sheer thickness of the outer coat of red would have taken me days to sand down so I used my 4 ½ inch angle grinder with a 200 grit finishing paper on the wheel.

Within 10 minutes the paint and cracks were sanded down and now I was going to clean out the cracks and glue them with Titebond wood glue, and let it set for the night.

After about 12 hours I removed the clamps and both cracks looked great and were ready for sanding by hand! So I went down the line sanding with 300, 400, 800, 1000, 1500 and 2000 grit dry wet sandpaper.

Each with small circle strokes for 5- minutes finishing with sanding the entire section in long back and forth strokes for the last minutes, just following the contour of the body lines.

With all the sanding done for now I wanted to get the wood to look like it was old and worn so I went to ACE Hardware and picked up a amber tinted shellac that went on with about 10 coats. After it all dried, I sanded and polished it all up and it looked so cool! I couldn’t wait to get to all back together.

I used Never Dull from Eagle One auto products to polish all the metal and it wore some of the gold plating of the edges. At first I was like oh man, then I was like, this looks cool! So I continued!

I used Martin Guitar Co. guitar polish to clean and protect the wood. This stuff works wonders on wood; get it alone for cleaning your fret board!

The build was successful in that all the parts were fitted very well and everything went smooth.

I also wanted to mention that when the guitar was in pieces I sanded down the base of the neck pocket and the bridge area down to wood! This helps bring out the TONE!


Take a listen to some audio starting in the bridge position:

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Noodling on a rebuilt 1996 Squire Pro Tone

As is this is a great guitar with killer tone and features for a project under $150. The relic job ended up looking classy with a bit of cool. To top off the great looks and sound, big red now has a story too! The entire project photo gallery is available to view here!

UPDATE: I found this great page that talks more about the Squire Pro Tone - http://www.21frets.com/squier_jv/theprotonepage.htm - EnJoy!