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This used to be an entry level Strat style guitar with a dual Singlecoil + Humbucker configuration and a neck that was in very poor condition as far as the frets go.

I started out by finding some nice quad rail ceramic pickups and a suitable pickguard to load them with. Some adjustments had to be made as the dimensions for the pickups, pickguard and guitar body didn’t quite match up.

Due to the very high output of ceramic pickups I also built a Faraday-cage with copper tape and made sure its solid with a multi-meter.

Next up was the fret leveling and re-crowning. I paid particular attention to the crown to make it as thin as possible. The fret installation was poor as mentioned above, the scale was off by as much as 0.5mm in some cases, the guitar couldn’t be intonated properly because of it.
The large jumbo-sized frets gave me enough room however to shift the crowns into proper territory. So the crowns weren’t always centered in the end but that wasn’t by mistake.
For the mirror finish I used a basic polish paste and 0000-steel wool treatments.

I proceeded to sand the finish off the neck and stain it with a blood red dye and refinish it with a polyurethane clear coat mixture. While the color turned out nice, the polyurethane felt sticky, even after waxing and sanding it to a 3000 grit. Lesson learned there.

The guitar had a Fender-style 5 way switch for the original pickup configuration. I replaced it with a standard 3-way switch for the humbuckers. Re-soldered everything, made sure the Faraday-cage was working properly and that the guitar is grounded.

Polished all the hardware with 0000-steel wool to a mirror finish, removed some rust with distilled white vinegar.

Put it all back together, re-string, adjust truss-rod, set action, set intonation, thats it. It was a fun little project, I didn’t expect much out of it as the guitar was of poor quality, but it ended up sounding rather nice and of course looking good.
The main goal for me was to practice my fret-leveling & re-crowning skills. I was very satisfied with the results of that, especially by how much I was able to improve the intonation by shifting the crowns.
Also a lot of valuable lessons were learned regarding the dyes and finish.