Hey Fender forum,
I have been in the market for a USA fender and think/hope I may have found the right one! One SNAFU is I have heard of all the fakes and can't tell it this is real or not... It has been hot rodded a little, so I am not 100% sure on what to check for originality. I don't want to get ripped off on my first USA strat! Help!

Heres what i have seen so far, just dont know what is normal or not... The neck looks real looking at the tuners and walnut truss surround (assuming the string placement bar was added toe work with the locking nut). There are some things that raised a flag on the neck:

1.) When I zoom in on the logo, it seems that the silver paint in "Fender" bleeds outside of the outline a little. Is that normal?
2.) Also to serial # looks a little crooked after N1. Not sure if that is normal either.

As for the body, it has an aftermarket Floyd rose trem (I'm fine with as a lead player) and aftermarket pickups. Both seem to be popular areas of validating a fake fender. The things that stand out on the body are:

1.) The corners look a little "sharper" than other strats (seem more rounded)
2.) There is a flat nut on the pick guard by the volume dial (can't think of what/why this would be - but the guitar has been hotrodded a little).
3.) the neck plate looks wrong for a 91. It is just plane chrome.
4.) the pick guard seems to have a little more space between the guitar edges than other fenders (could be the glare). Thoughts?

Everything I have here is just from research and I am not as much of an expert with fenders as the members on this forum. I could just be looking too far into this...

Any obvious tell tell signs of it being real/fake from what I listed or from the pics?

Sorry, had a hard time getting the links working. Here are some pics:

JT - sorry but your photos are too small to really make anything out. From what I can see the neck does looks reasonably legit; I can't tell about the body from your shots. I should point out that the American Standard bodies of the 1990 were somethat less "rounded" than the bodies from 2000 on (that was one of the big changes between the original American Standards and the American Series models that came out in July 2000).

Bummer about the pics. I'm not tech Savy enough to he them any bigger (been trying).

You info about the body was very helpful though. Based on what I saw (such as the bleeding silver, solid chrome neck plate, and slightly misaligned serial #), does anything like that stand out as normal or abnormal?

Ps I can email bigger pics if anyone wants to see them, just can't get the img URL any bigger...

Thanks!

The neck plate would not be correct for an American Standard of that era; it should have the modern-style "Fender" script on it (at an upward angle). There just isn't a large enough photo to confirm anything about the body. I would suspect that only the neck is legit. It isn't a big deal for the serial number to be misaligned.