The Unicorn: The Guitar that Shouldn't Exist.

I first saw her in January 2025. She was listed as a used piece on the Detroit Guitar dealer site; I was immediately smitten with the guitar’s heavy relic finish – it reminded me of the Frusciante or McCready signature models, albeit with its “own thing” going on. And a maple neck/fretboard… I’m a sucker for a maple neck/fretboard.

The next day on my lunch hour, I rushed to Detroit Guitar to see / play / purchase the guitar. However, upon arrival, they informed me that the guitar was off-site; they could arrange to have it delivered to the store later that afternoon. My window was short as I had other work meetings. The guitar quickly disappeared from their website. I was crushed.

August 2025. My wife and I are on Mackinac Island, which is the kind of place you go specifically to not think about guitars. I'm not thinking about guitars. Yeah, right, he says as he looks down at the various guitar porn magazines next to the sunscreen and boat drinks.

Then my phone goes off, and it's Eric.

If you've read anything here before, you know Eric. Fellow collector, human early-warning system, the guy who finds the thing and then makes sure I know about the thing. He'd spotted her — back at Detroit Guitar, used, listed again. He put me in touch with Charlie at the shop, and while I sat by the water at the far top of the state, hundreds of miles from my guitar room, Charlie sent over photos and the specs off the Floor Traveler.

I balked for a minute, thinking I could handle this when I got back home from vacation; then I thought better of it and reached back out to Charlie to close the deal. “Sorry, just sold,” Charlie said. 

This was the second time I chased this elusive guitar and it was now gone again. Two sightings. Two misses. And I want to be clear that both were self-inflicted. Nobody outbid me. Nobody sniped me. Twice I had the guitar within reach, and twice I let a lunch schedule or a lake view talk me out of it.

I shouldn’t have balked. Never balk.

In late September 2025, the guitar reared its relic’d head again, this time on the Fender Custom Shop forum on strat-talk.com.

The poster – JoeM19 – shared, “Not usually a fan of heavy relics, but this one just checked all the boxes.”

About that neck…
The guitar caused a bit of a stir on the forum, as other posters began debating with Joe about the guitar. She was spec'd as a '63. But she wore a maple fretboard. And to anyone who knows their Fender history, those two facts don't belong in the same sentence.

Here's why. By 1963, the standard Stratocaster had moved off maple necks/boards. Fender switched the production Strat to a rosewood fretboard around 1959 — first the thick "slab" board, then the thinner veneer boards you see through the mid-'60s. 

A 1963 Strat is a rosewood-board guitar, full stop. It's why every Custom Shop '63 you'll ever see listed — Time Machine, Vintage Custom, the whole catalog — ships with a rosewood fingerboard. That's the correct period spec. A maple-board '63 reads, at first glance, like a contradiction in terms.

Go ahead and google that model from the Fender Custom Shop and see what you come up with – I dare you. You won’t find another ‘63 model with a maple neck/fretboard. 

Joe defended himself, sharing specs from the floor traveler, and everyone was scratching their heads. One poster shared “when I got my Vintage Custom ‘62, with maple cap neck, Fender reps had justified the design by saying rare examples were produced.”

I reached out to Joe and told him that this was the third time I had seen this guitar after two previous swings and misses; if he ever wanted to sell the guitar - hit me up. Joe said “If it makes you feel any better, I’m an unabashed flipper, keep watching…”

True to his word, Joe reached out in October. We agreed to meet at my bank the next morning, and at last, the guitar was mine.

R102508
The guitar model is listed as a 1963 Stratocaster Heavy Relic. The body is ash, not alder – which, to my eye, gives it great ‘grain’ appeal. Produced in May of 2020, it’s listed as a Heavy Relic… boy, if this is heavy relic, I hate to see what the finish apprentice’s view of super heavy relic would be. This thing looks like it’s been to hell and back. To justify this, the build notes spec it "Super Super Heavy Relic". That’s a new one on me… Super – Super Heavy Relic?

Let’s take a deep dive on this neck: round-laminated maple cap, 2-piece, no skunk stripe. That's not a one-piece maple neck like a '54 or a '70s Strat. It's the exact construction Fender used for their rosewood boards in that era — a separate fingerboard cap glued to a maple neck with a curved (round-laminated) seam — except here the cap is maple instead of rosewood. This guitar is literally a '63 rosewood-era neck with maple for the fretboard. 

In addition to the bizarre maple neck/board configuration, this guitar is tricked out with all gold relic’d hardware… on a very heavy-relic '63. An unusual, almost contradictory pairing — worn-to-hell finish with dress-up hardware… kind of like wearing cufflinks with torn raggedy jeans.

Given all this, one would presume this is a Limited Edition model (and a Limited Edition, as regular readers know, ticks a big box for me). However, it’s not. No special order, no limited run… What gives?

The Floor Traveler states the original dealer was Detroit Guitar. To dig further, I reached out to Charlie at DG for any background information he may have on this instrument: “Couldn’t find much info on it. We switched software in 2021 so there’s only so much I can see. I can tell you it wasn’t a special order based on the PO that shows on the spec sheet, and it wasn’t a showcase guitar based on the same. My guess is that it was something we ordered for stock. Back in those days, one thing that we used to do a lot was find a CS that we liked and change the color and level of distress, so it’s very possible that’s what we did.”

Test Drive. 
Let’s saddle up and take the Unicorn for a test run. The “63-C” profile neck is slightly chunky (not necessarily a baseball bat, and to be fair, I have small hands). But it is comfortable to play, and I love the relic finish that FCS does on the back of these necks so much so that I can barely play a standard lacquered neck anymore.

This guitar has some of the same electronics features we previously discussed when we profiled the Mischief Maker: Master Volume, Master Tone, and a Neck/Bridge Pickup Blend on the third knob. 

On this guitar, the Blender allows one to blend in the Neck pickup in switch positions one and two: Position 1: Bridge with Neck Blend; Position 2: Bridge and Middle with Neck Blend. This ½ Blender pot bleeds the neck pickup into positions it normally can't reach — so you get neck+bridge together for that "Tele-ish" honk that a stock 5-way Strat can't do. 

This Blender knob is rapidly becoming something I really dig, and am thinking of installing on all of my go-to guitars – it’s a really useful tonal tool that tempers some of the harshness of the bridge pickup – especially for hard rock sounds. Overall – the Unicorn is a rock-n-roll machine. It sounds great on all classic and harder rock tunes. 

Don’t Balk at Unicorns.
I chased the Unicorn for nearly a year. This guitar had been floating around the Detroit community for a while; not sure why – it’s an awesome guitar. The Unicorn is in my stable now. When you spot one in the wild, never balk. 

The Specs