My 1976 Strat has patent applied for pickups. Neck is blue, middle is red and bridge is gold. The pickups all have a Fender Lace Sensor logo on them. Anybody know what year they might be. Didn't they show up around 1987 in the strat plus models?

PS; They are near noiseless, hot and sound excellent. Better than the Gold Lace set I had in another Strat.

I'm trying to remember when all the versions game out - in 1987 the gold-logo Laces were on the Strat Plus and the blue-logo and silver-logo ones were on the Strat Plus Deluxe. I didn't see a red-logo until more like 1990, but they could have been available before then even if Fender wasn't putting them on a factory model guitar.

The golds were also on Clapton's sig. Strat from '88. Great classic sounding pickups.

Fender started using Laces in productions guitars in late 1987. The first ones issued used Gold lace Sensors (Strat Plus Standard). Then in 89 they came out with the Strat Plus DX using two Silver Lace Sensors (neck & middle) with a Blue Lace in the bridge. (Then later, the in 1990 Fender changed to Blue/Silver/Red on the DX models.) Here is how you can identify them.



Lace Sensors had only white and orange wires up till around 1989-1990, then the Lace Music Company added the extra green ground wire around 1991. The pre-1990 Laces will have a smooth top and the later pickups (1990 onward) have the Lace logo counter sunk in a indentation on the top of the pickup. You will notice while examining the pictures above that the pre-1990 pickups also have square edges on the bottom. Some people have this idea that the older Lace pickups are better sounding than the newer ones. In talking to the people at Lace, they are still made the same way, but now have an extra ground wire.

Also Fender had an exclusive contract with Lace from 87 till 96. After that Fender started to phase out the Laces (around 98-99) using their new Noiseless line. So now on the market you will find two types of logos on the top of the pickups: Fender Lace Sensor and just plain old Lace Sensor It just depends on the cover put on the pickup for the market place, i.e. Fender OEM or direct from Lace. The color of the ink of the logo indicated the type of pickup.

Edit: Typos

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Thank you for the wonderful info. Mine have an indented logo so are later models. In any case they sound super and now I know when they were made.

Excellent presentation. Thank you again.