Mid 1959 Stratocaster vintage guitars have a slab rosewood fingerboard with white "clay" position dots. The fingerboard radius of this Fender guitar is 7.25". The bottom fingerboard is flat. Vintage Fender Stratocasters made July 1959 and after basically will have rosewood fingerboards. The neck now has a very thin "D" backshape, by the end of 1959 it gets even thinner.

Stratocaster vintage Fender guitars from mid-1959 have a celluloid "mint green" three layer pickguard which is white/black/white. Sometimes the pickguard of this vintage Fender is called a "nitro" pickguard. The celluloid pickguard was first introduced to the Stratocaster guitar around July 1959. Before that, rosewood fingerboard vintage Stratocasters were made with a single white pickguard with 9 or 10 screws.

During the same time period in 1959 some vintage Fender Stratocaster guitars were made with maple neck and a 8 screw three layer celluloid pickguard. In order to replace the thicker and much smaller shield previously used on guitars single layer pickguards, a thin aluminum shield the size of the pickguard was installed underneath the three layer pickguard.

Fender used a very photo-reactive dye in their sunburst finish of the vintage Stratocaster guitar. This caused many 1959 Strats to fade from 3-color sunburst to a 2-color. The photo-reactive nature of the red on the Strat Fender guitar caused fading from ultra-violet light. The fading is noticeable up close, from a distance it is difficult to recognize.

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