Fender American Professional Strat set up

This set up was Jonathan's Fender American Professional Strat. Great looking guitar, generally very good quality build and excellent Lollar single coils (obviously aftermarket replacements). Sadly the gloss maple finish has been applied in the good old, slap-dash, cost-saving BAD way at the Fender Corona factory. Here it seems they take a bare neck, press in the frets and then spray the whole neck, fingerboard and all with clear and/or tinted poly. This leaves the finish riding up and over the frets like a long sticky carpet. They scrape the finish off the frets during polishing and dispatch it from the factory after a quick buff. This is an easy way to do it - but scraping the finish off the top of the frets breaks up that thick poly carpet and invites flaking. It's even worse when the guitar reaches the point where it needs a re-fret. Pulling up the frets rips up the remnants of the poly 'carpet' even more - leaving 21 frayed rectangles of poly longing to peel back and fall off. Even if you were to try to fret over that (and believe me, I have) you have little or no control of the rubble-strewn surface you're trying to lay new frets on.
Tonight, thankfully, as I was not re-fretting all I had to worry about was the small possibility that this clear poly finish might also be from one of the Fender batches that suffered from poor adhesion qualities... I'm happy to report that the finish help up well, and overall the set up was - for once - trouble free!