As a lifelong fan of Eddie Van Halen, I've decided to build a Frankenstrat replica. I've always wanted one of these and, in my early years, copied his ideas by masking off and painting stripes on my candy apple red Ibanez Destroyer (my first real guitar). There are official remakes of Eddie's original but I'd rather make my own in the spirit of EVH.

There are tons of tutorials and images out there that you can use for reference. A quick google for Frankenstrat will turn up bunches of them. I figured I'd add to the reference info by showing how I'm building mine.

Eddie's version was a Boogie Body which was a copy of a vintage Strat with three single coil pickups. He opened up the bridge cavity to accomodate a humbucker and had to widen the middle position as well since he decided to stuff the 5-way switch down in there. The original body was Swamp Ash which is what I ordered from byoguitar.com.

You can see where the bridge has been set up for a standard strat tremolo. Since Eddie used a Floyd Rose, I need to fill those holes before the first coat of paint. In keeping with the do it yourself vibe, I took some skewers that we use for making shish-ka-bob and filled the holes in with those and a little bit of wood filler.

The last part before painting is to widen the original pickup cutouts to match the Frankenstrat. Eddie used a hammer and chisel which is why they look so gouged up on his original. In my case, I used a handy dandy router to speed up the process.

You'll want to recreate the angle of the bridge position because EVH tilted the humbucker a bit when he installed it. He also opened up the middle position since that's where he eventually installed the 5-way switch.