Ha! We love our acronyms, don't we! In this case meaning new tortoise shell pick guard day! I posted pictures of my SVL '61 Reserve strat awhile back. Best playing and sounding "S" guitar I've ever owned and I've owned a bunch of original vintage Fender Strats (1956-63) over the decades...yup, been playing git-tar for 50 years! When I got the guitar from Simon it had an aged "mint" guard. I wanted something a bit more unusual so I undertook to find as realistic a replacement tortoise guard as possible. No easy task, most repros look nothing like an original early 60's tortoise guard. But you'd have to pay thousands of dollars to obtain a real vintage guard if you could even find one. So I purchased a tortoise guard made by ace Japanese repro parts makers Montreux. It looks quite a bit like an original tortoise guard (including having the requisite yellow "chunks") and cost me under $100! Anyway, I like the way it looks. What do y'all think? eace2