Fun with pickups, pots, screws and bridges

Painting? Routing? Set-up tips? Or just straight-up making a guitar from scratch? Post here, and post pics!

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NickS
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Fun with pickups, pots, screws and bridges

Post by NickS »

Just had a fun couple of days with my son Matt's Schecter Diamond Series C1+ that he's decided to recommission. He bought it for a song with his first student loan as it had faulty electrics. Back then we installed CTS pots and an Alpha coil split switch/tone pot, not realising that CTS are 24-spline pots and the Schecter (Korean) knobs are 18-spline so that never worked too well. The original black shit around the pickups pickup mounting rings were cracked and the mounting ring fixing screws were rusty so he bought replacement mounting rings and a pack of 50 mounting ring fixing screws. Of course, fixing rings are different heights and graduated screws are available for a premium but screw that, the body is thick enough to use the same length screws in all positions. He had an old Seymour Duncan JB that he bought for his Jackson and we got him a new Seymour Duncan SH2n for the neck position. He brought it over at the start of the week and we discussed what needed doing. Wile he was strumming it we noticed an odd resonance that turned out to be the truss rod not being under tension. A quarter turn sorted that out.

So I installed the pickups and pots and the original knobs fit perfectly. While doing this I noticed that the height adjustment screws didn't match. Maybe they got mistakenly swapped when we put that £10 back in the day no-name humbucker into his Squier Strat? So I dismantled the Squier Strat and the height adjustment screws had been cut down to suit. I ended up polishing the rust off the original Schecter screws and they look OK.
Schecter2_small.jpg
Schecter2_small.jpg (97.73 KiB) Viewed 68 times
Road test; neck pickup selection is intermittent. Take the control plate out, unfix the switch, spray with Servisol (Kontakt Chemie) Super 10 and adjust the contacts on the toggle switch. Perfetto! Just double-check the intonation and the Schecter's good to go. I was slightly surprised that wired as per SD's diagram the single coils that are active on each pickup are the ones nearest each other but that was how we had the Schecter pickups wired and he was happy with that.

However.... plugged the Squier Strat back in and no output. Aargh. Slacken off the strings yet again and pop the scratchplate... output wire had come off last time I wrangled the scratchplate back into place. With these pickups coming out and going back in I was glad (a) I had one of those things for cranking tuning machines and (b) this '98 Squier has the 8-hole scratchplate. Soldered the wire back into place, reinstalled and double-checked the Roland hex pickup was still working. Adjusted the height on the no-name humbucker to give some more output. The output from the combined humbucker and mid sounded a bit thin so I tried reversing the humbucker and it made very little difference. That humbucker's DC resistance is about 6.8k vs the SD's 13.2k.

So while I was at it I decided to sort out the bridge on Mike's old Hondo II Les Paul copy. Last time I fiddled with it I didn't realise that the notches on the bridge saddles were two different depths. I'm not sure it's made a lot of difference to the buzz on the G but that may be because the bridge is now a bit lower anyway. Properly intonated and ready to rock.

Last week I shimmed the neck of the Variax Standard to lower the action. I've really enjoyed spending some time doing these hands-on guitar tech things.
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