The Rarest of the Rare! The Earliest "Maple Cap" We Have Ever Seen!

This 12 3/4-inch-wide guitar weighs just 7.60 lbs. and has a nice, fat nut width of 1 11/16 inches and a scale length of 25 1/2 inches. One-piece alder body contoured on back and lower bass bout, one-piece maple neck, and maple-cap fretboard with 21 frets and black dot position markers. Small headstock with decal with "Fender" logo in gold with black trim, "Stratocaster" in black beside it, and "With Synchronized Tremolo" and four patent numbers in black below. Single "butterfly" string tree with nylon spacer. Individual "dual-line" Kluson Deluxe tuners with oval metal buttons. Three white plastic-covered single-coil pickups with staggered polepieces and outputs of 5.82k, 6.01k, and 5.91k. Three-layer (white/black/white) plastic pickguard with eleven screws. Three controls (one volume, two tone) plus three-way selector switch, all on pickguard. Jack socket in body face. White plastic knobs with green lettering. Fender "Synchronized Tremolo" combined bridge/tailpiece. This guitar is in near mint condition, with no fretboard wear, virtually no fret wear, only the absolute bare minimum of belt buckle marking on the back (which you can't see unless you hold the guitar up against a light), a few tiny marks on the sides, and the bare minimum of body checking. On the white plastic tremolo cover on the back of the guitar, two of the corners (approximately 1/8 and 1/4 inch in size) at the bottom have broken away where the screws have been over tightened. Housed in its original Fender black hardshell case with red plush lining (9.25).

This guitar is a wonderful, typical 1965 three-tone Sunburst. Maple caps were offered on Stratocasters as a factory option from 1967 to late 1969. All of these were with the CBS large headstock and were much favored by many guitarists, including the late, great Jimi Hendrix. All maple-cap Strats are notoriously rare. This guitar, with an original small pre-CBS headstock and a neck date of "2 JUN 65 B," predates by two years any known maple-cap Stratocaster. This actual guitar is recorded in Werner's List as: "L46968 JUN 65 Strat M/N."

"The Stratocaster was launched during 1954 [and was priced at $249.50, or $229.50 without vibrato]. Samples around May and June were followed by the first proper production run in October. The new Fender guitar was the first solidbody electric with three pickups [Gibson's electric-acoustic ES-5, introduced five years earlier, had been the overall first], meaning a range of fresh tones, and featured a new-design vibrato unit that provided pitch-bending and shimmering chordal effects. The new vibrato -- erroneously called a 'tremolo' by Fender and many others since -- was troublesome in development. But the result was the first self-contained vibrato unit: an adjustable bridge, a tailpiece, and a vibrato system, all in one. It wasn't a simple mechanism for the time, but a reasonably effective one...Fender's new vibrato had six bridge-pieces, one for each string, adjustable for height and length, which meant that the feel of the strings could be personalized and the guitar made more in tune with itself...The Strat came with a radically sleek, solid body, based on the outline of the 1951 Fender Precision Bass. Some musicians had complained to Fender that the sharp edge of the Telecaster's body was uncomfortable...so the Strat's body was contoured for the player's comfort. Also, it was finished in a yellow-to-black sunburst finish. Even the jack socket mounting was new, recessed in a stylish plate on the body face...the Fender Stratocaster looked like no other guitar around [and in some ways seemed to owe more to the contemporary automobile design than traditional guitar forms], especially the flowing, sensual curves of that beautifully proportioned, timeless body. The Stratocaster's new-style pickguard complemented the lines perfectly, and the overall impression was of a guitar where all the components ideally suited one another. The Fender Stratocaster has since become the most popular, the most copied, the most desired, and very probably the most played solid electric guitar ever" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of Fender, p. 18).