What is the longevity of a Maple neck.
How do you deal with worn grayish areas?
Ronald

Hi Ronald: if your neck is showing worn through areas in the lacquer on the fingerboard then I expect it is a vintage or vintage reissue type model finished in nitrocellulose rather than polyurethane. It takes forever to wear through urethane.

It is common that when maple 'boards are refretted they get relacquered at the same time, so that deals with your issue. If you don't like the wear marks you could choose to have it relacquered with urethane rather than nitro during or prior to a refret: that would solve the issue almost forever. Alternatively, if you like nitro and/or like the wear marks then don't sweat it: it will be decades before it actually does any harm to the playability of the neck.
In Paul Balmer's "The Stratocaster Handbook", his wear through the finish on his maple neck, he said was attributed to actually the poly coating, then his luthier friend, John Diggins took the poly off and resprayed with nitro. He said the nitro is harder than the poly. Just what I read.

Also, strictly in the politest, friendliest tone, I'd further suggest that if you don't like the worn patches on your fingerboard you have a look at the length of your nails on your fretting fingers. Often it is nails rather than fingertips that do damage to fretboards - though not always. Something to double-check.

I recall that Eric Clapton's Blackie Strat was refretted and relacquered twice in its 17 year playing life. Each time it was relacquered the new lacquer effectively sealed in the previous dirty wear marks. When Fender came to do their scratch-for-scratch copy of Blackie they had to find a way of simulating that wear-on-lacquer-on-wear-on-lacquer effect. A very clever thing to accomplish - if rather weird, in my meaningless opinion.

Far as the longevity of the neck itself is concerned: well, maple is a very hard, durable wood. Not only are there 60 year old Strats that are still perfectly playable, other stringed instruments such as viols and violins are still going strong after two, three and four centuries. (Though very few 18th century or older violins have their original necks - but that is not to do with wear.)

Anyway, Ronald. Care to tell us more about this Strat of yours? Just out of interest.

Cheers - C