On the bench today is the 70th Anniversary Vintera II Antigua Stratocaster.

I do not know why I like the Antigua finish, but I do. I recently referred to it as the cilantro of guitar finishes – meaning you either love it or hate it.

The 70th Anniversary Stratocaster arrived in the classic black fender tolex guitar case with orange interior. I am really surprised and happy that a made in Mexico guitar came in a case instead of a padded gig bag.

Lots of case candy came with the guitar.

First inspection of the overall fit and finish seems to be good.

70 years is an amazing length of time for a product to be produced with little changes. Actually most of us prefer the guitar to be exactly as it was the first day is was made all the way back in 1954.

I plugged in my multimeter and got the following measurements on the three pickups:

Neck came in at 5.53 k ohms
Middle Pickup measured at 5.86 k ohms
And the Bridge pickup measured 7.12 k ohms

Next, I put the guitar on the scale. The weight was 7 pounds and 6.8 ounces or 3.368 Kilograms.

One observation before I start the rest of the video. I pulled the guitar from the case and tuned it up and played it for a few minutes as anyone would do when you get a new guitar. I could barely tune the high E String. I will look at it more closely later in the video.

My first issue came up when I was removing the strings. The string ferrule for the A string came off with the string. I have grown to expect this with lower end price guitars like Squier and Harley Benton. It is an easy fix. For Made in Mexico and US made Fenders I kind of find it unacceptable. I pushed the ferrule back into the hole in the back of the guitar. It was very loose but would not come back out (surprisingly) after reinserting it.

Next, I check the neck and frets. I found the fret ends to be smooth as I run my hands up and down the sides of the neck. I checked for fret rocking on all frets and found nothing at all.

I then removed the pickguard to inspect the electronics and pickups. I had trouble removing the screw at the lower horn of the pickguard. It just would spin. I ended up pulling up on the pickguard so there would be some pressure and removed the screw.

The electronics and pickups look good. Except for what I can only describe as Scotch tape being used to secure the wires of the pickups. It is brittle and coming apart. I hope I am wrong, but I have not seen clear tape being used to secure wires before in Fender products.

When I restrung the guitar, I had no issues with the ferrules. I did however discover why I was having problems tuning the high e string. The tuner was bent. I wanted to finish the overview and play the recorded samples, so I pulled a 70s style neck I had and swapped out the tuners.

Once I changed the tuner there were no more issues with tuning the guitar.

This is a very different video that I intended. I was so excited when the guitar showed up. I wanted to film the video right way. I have since contacted Fender support and opened a support ticket. They asked me for pictures and a description of the problems. I don’t think they were expecting someone to video record everything, so it was easy for me to take screen shots and send them.

One part of me wants to send this guitar back and get a new one. I paid a lot of money for this guitar. Much more than traditionally I do spend on a guitar since I started the channel. Another part of me just wants them to send me a replacement tuner and keep the guitar. I am used to guitars needing TLC. This is kind of my thing as I portray on the channel.

I have grown to be a great advocate of the made in Mexico guitars. My overall feeling is they are an incredible value when compared to the US made counterparts. I have a lot of them in my collection. I hope this is an anomaly and not what we can expect from Fender when it comes to quality control.