Eddie's Frankenstein/Frankenstrat Guitar

The Frankenstrat is Eddie's attempt to cross pollinate a Gibson and Fender. The Frankenstrat is an ash Stratocaster body with a routing that Eddie made to fit in a Gibson PAF humbucking bridge pickup, with a single coil neck pickup. The neck pickup was simply for decoration and was never actually wired with the humbucker, due to Eddie's inability to wire the switch properly. It has a maple neck, chrome hardware, and red, black, and white stripes. It is a six string guitar with an original Floyd Rose tremolo.

Building the Frankenstrat

Body and Neck

Eddie Van Halen bought the Frankenstrat's ash body and maple neck for a total of $130. Both of these parts were from Wayne Charvel, who sold Boogie Body-made body and necks. The body of the guitar was a "second," called so because it was not cosmetically pleasing. In Van Halen's case, the body had a knot in the wood. He bought it for $50 anyway because he believed it would perform fine. The maple neck of the guitar cost him $80.

Pickup

Eddie got hold of a PAF (Patent Applied For) pickup from his Gibson ES-335. He had the idea to dip the pickup in paraffin wax to reduce microphonic feedback, a technique that has since been adopted by many major guitar manufacturers. He screwed the pickup to the guitar in the bridge position slightly sideways to allow for string spacing differences to the pickup's magnetic pole spacing.

Paint and finish

Eddie painted the guitar black. After it was dry he put strips of masking tape on the body and painted it white. This would be the black and white "classic" version of the Frankenstrat. In 1979, Eddie put more tape on the body and painted over that with Red Schwinn Bicycle paint.

Controls

Van Halen got rid of both tone control potentiometers (pots) and wired up the pickups in a simple circuit, due largely to his limited knowledge of electrical circuitry. Van Halen famously used a knob reading 'tone' on the volume control spot. He then used a vinyl record he cut up to use as a pickguard to cover the controls.

Bridge

Edward also added a Floyd Rose tremolo system. A relatively unknown product at the time, the Floyd Rose allowed for deeper bending at the same time as providing much greater tuning stability due to its patented "double locking" system.