Hi guys, I bought my MIJ stratocaster about 7 years ago from my retiring high school teacher who was a guitar collector. I don't remember any details about the guitar from that teacher either than him telling me he got it from Japan and it was a "Fuji-gen". Icouldn't find a way to contact him either cause he passed away recently...

Anyway, I was wondering about the specifications, condition and potential value of my guitar. Currently, my guitar sounds great with my amp (VOX ADVT50W) and there is only a slight fret buzz on the G string. Some parts of the guitar have knicks/light scratches on it, and the paint in the back is starting to wear away. There are 22 frets in total and the serial number is E540198. I have a whammy bar that was given to me when I purchased it, but it didn't fit. The teacher told me I had to take it to a guitar shop to grind it down a little bit or something.

Here are some pictures below, any help would be greatly appreciated!

P.S- The guitar's a bit dirty since I let my brother use it while I'm at university... He has no idea of what maintaining a guitar is.

It's a Fender Contemporary Strat from circa 1985-1986; these were build by the Fuji-Gen Gakki company in Japan. Fuji-Gen was the factory that built Ibanez and Greco guitars back then. These were first imported to the USA during the time period right after FMIC bought Fender from CBS in February 1985 when Fender didn't have a factory (FMIC didn't buy CBS's factory in Fullerton and didn't get the new Corona factory up until October 1985). Also only the "E" means anything for dating the guitar ("E" was used from 1984-1986); it's just kind of lucky that this one's numeric part starts with a "5".

At any rate there is a good website with specs of these MIJ Fenders:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/john.blackman4/history.htm

Here is their page on the Contemporary models:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/john.blackman4/cont.htm

This should be a model 27-4100 but it appears that the locking nut was removed and replaced with a regular nut.

+1

I too thought I saw evidence of a nut change.

Arjay

_________________
"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

Thanks for the link! That clears up alot of questions I had...
I've searched on Ebay to see selling prices of MIJ strats and they seem to be around 400~500. Would my guitar cost about that much? Or because of the condition/changes of my guitar, would the price decrease or increase (for ex. since the stock nut has been changed, would that decrease my guitar value?

Thanks for all your help guys, awesome!

Any deviation from stock guise usually decreases an instrument's value to some extent. However, your guitar is in otherwise clean condition (relative to its age) so if there's a penalty to the commercial value, I'd opine that it would be minimal at best.

HTH

Arjay

_________________
"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

+1

Your Strat has what Fender called the "System II" trem unit; the System II and another unit called the System III both used the same locking nut. It was a pretty clever device that had a lever on the side; the lever opened and closed locks that squeezed the string in the nut. Unfortunately there haven't been spare parts available for these since probably 1986, so I'm sure that at some point it either stopped functioning or the owner got tired of messing with it and just replaced it with a regular nut. It's not a common mod on these, but it's not a rare mod either, and it is the only thing you can do if the original nut fails.

I can't find a good photo of one, but if you go to this page on that site I linked up earlier you can download the manual for the System II/System III trems:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/john.blackman4/trem.htm

There is a drawing on Page 4 of the manual that shows the locking nut that was originally on your Strat.

The System II trem bridge is essentially the same as the FreeFlyte bridge used on USA-built Elite Strats from 1983/84 (and evidently a few Elites were built by Fender Japan for another year or so but they were never imported to the USA) so you might be able to find a trem arm by looking for one for a FreeFlyte.

+1

I see them periodically listed on Ebay.

Arjay

_________________
"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

I've got to tell you, I really like it just like it is. This guitar reeks of positive MoJo! I think $400 to $500 is reasonable but it just depends on if you find the right buyer but $350-$400 is probally what people will offer up for it. I'd hang on to it if it were mine just because of the cool factor!