Well, it turns out I was wrong about the Squier. It is not circa 1992, but 1989-1990… doesn’t seem like much, but it’s actually a significant difference.

I traced the seral number through Fender, and it appears this is a USA made Squier which is actually a pretty rare thing.

From wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squier#USA_Squiers

USA Squiers
USA Squiers are very rare and some of them have a serial number with a E prefix. While the specific year of manufacture cannot be determined, they were made for less than a year spanning 1989 and 1990.

So yea, that’s neat…. not sure it’ll stop be from completing the project, but I’m going to dig a bit deeper and see if I should just keep this as is and move the project to another guitar. I’d hate to piss off the guitar gods by gutting something rare. Thoughts?