King Henry Partscaster prototype

My foray into luthiery started many years ago by swapping pickups in a strat, and has evolved into partscaster builds starting in 2020. This is one of my favorite partscaster builds, loaded with high quality components and features.

Body

Real Life Relics body is gorgeous seafoam green alder with very tasteful relicing. The thin satin nitro finish really lets the body resonate and feels and sounds great to play. It is lovely to touch and admire, and begs to be played! I paired it with off-white knobs and parchment pickup covers, and a beautiful anodized gold with paisley engraved pattern from Perle pickguards. The anodized gold is fully shielded and helps keep idle noise to a minimum. The wiring itself is premium gavitt pushback cloth wiring, wired with kestrel 60/40 solder and using only highest quality CTS pots and CRL switches. Tone cap is premium though i forget which brand (orange drop, sozo etc). If you really need I can check but will require a restring. Output jack is a PureTone, and the bottom tone pot is a push pull to activate the neck pickup in any position, giving you a total of 7 pickup combinations and the bridge/neck tele combo sounds great with these pickups.

Pickups are a set of Tornade MS60 pickups, which provide great single coil chime and clarity. If you back off the height a bit you can get a really nice sultans of swing knopfler-esque tone. Set up to Fender recommended pickup heights sounds bold clear and articulate, just how you expect high quality single coils to sound. The neck is a joy to play, with a compound radius and nice rosewood slab fingerboard.

The only blemish is my mistake installing a string tree, which is pictured. The staggered tuners in conjunction with the reverse headstock makes string tree usage negligible, plus the locking Kluson revolution tuners maintain tune so well I personally havent missed a string tree once while playing this, and i bend alot!

Tremolo itself is a genuine Fender American strat style with the two post mount.