Before starting

Here's a picture of the "mostly" stock guitar. At this point I've already added three springs to the tremolo to lock it down to the body. This effectively makes it a hard tail. I don't really care about the tremolo anyway. I've read of some people fitting blocks of wood into the tremolo cavity to make it a true hard tail and increase sustain a little. But that's seems too drastic for me.

My first tip for you is to take lots of pictures, especially of the wiring. Just in case you need to look back at them later.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that this is a 2004 deluxe edition squier strat.