When I was a teenager in the late '70s there used to be a great vintage guitar store in Cambridge, MA called East Coast Guitars. It was a tiny little basement store but they had one hell of a selection! Back then I was really into Strats and there was one time in particular they happened to have two excellent specimens in stock. The first one I was a cream/yellow '61 in really nice shape for $850, but it was in a glass display case so I was afraid to ask them to take it out. Then, I noticed another one hanging on the "regular" rack with a bunch of other vintage guitars. It was a 1963 metal-flake blue Stratocaster and it was one of the coolest guitars I had ever seen! There were some noticeable dark surface cracks along the top but they were only asking $650 for it so I figured it would be OK to ask to try this one. Today I can't really remember exactly "how" it played but I do remember that it sounded great and it just looked killer! I mean the color and finish was surf/hotrod nirvana!

Now you have to remember that back then $650 was a lot of money, especially to a 16-year old kid with only a part-time job. I had just recently bought my first real guitar, a Guild S-300D and it only cost $300. My second real guitar, a '74 Gibson Les Paul Custom, cost $400, so $650 would have been almost double my guitar budget. Today that would be like having a $3000 spending limit when the guitar you really want costs $7000. Oh well, sometimes I still kick myself for not trying a little harder to come up with the extra money to buy that guitar. The funny thing is I ended up spending $750 on a Strat a few years later when Fender released the '62 Vintage Reissue in 1982!

Finally this brings up something I'm a little confused about. If I recall correctly, Metal-Flake is a trademarked brand name for automobile paint and with this paint process being a specialty job mostly associated with custom hot rods, Fender had to send these guitars to a local auto body/paint shop because they didn’t have the correct paint-spraying equipment in-house. As far as Fender custom colors go, is the "metal-flake" finish the same as the "sparkle" finish? At first I thought that maybe they were the same and the only difference was that back in the early '60s Fender had licensed the Metal-Flake name and its various trademarked colors (Inca Gold, Candy Apple Red, Burgundy Wine, etc.) but today they just use the generic term "sparkle-finish" instead. Then again, I've seen a few Fender metallic sparkle-finish guitars in person and I'm pretty sure that the metal-flake finish looked a little different. I remember that it was made up of actual shiny metallic flakes, like you would see on an old '50s/60s hot rod, while the sparkle-finish is just made up of tiny specks of glitter or sparkles. Since encountering that blue one 30 years ago I have only come across a few other Metal-Flake Strats and most of them seem to be blue, but I think I remember seeing a red one somewhere. Are there examples of any other colors? Also, if I remember correctly, all of them were 1963 (maybe 1964 also?) models. Was that the only year that custom finish was available?

I have been looking all over the place online and in various guitar books but I can't seem to find much information regarding Fender and Metal-Flake finishes. Then, if you add the sparkle finishes into the mix it makes it even more confusing! I did find a few Fender books that mention the "sparkle" finishes but only Norman's Rare Guitars book mentions the Metal-Flake finish and shows a picture. Here is a custom 1963 metal-flake blue Strat from his personal collection. The caption states that only four or five of these "Metal-Flake" Strats were made at the time so I imagine that vintage examples must be extremely rare.

There are current model FSR Strats that are metal flake. I have one. It is a 2010 mim model. Is that kinda what you are looking for. They are listed on MF.