Stratocopy

Well, it's certainly been a bit of a day here at Atomic Tangerine. Having had a terrible night's sleep I overslept enough that I missed most of the overtime I'd volunteered for, enough that it simply wasn't worth going in. Fail. So following shower, exercise and breakfast I decided to get going on that Stratcopy I'm working on for a friend.

I downloaded a generic wiring diagram from StewMac, and set to work. I won't bore you with all the details but I ended up with a pretty neat wiring job.


Yuh huh, I'm pretty happy with that.

So neck the pickups go in, the neck and middle from the Strat body I got from Mr. Foxen, and the bridge was originally the neck pickup in my old Jag-Stang, so the guitar has a 6.0k bridge pickup as opposed to 5.2k.

Aaaaanyway, I wire up the jack, ground the bridge and set to work using my trusty old Peavey Envoy 110 and a tuning fork (it's much easier to test pickups this way as it means not having to remove brand new strings if you need to do more work), and what I found was a little surprising. Position 1 on the switch was giving me the neck pickup, position two was the neck and bridge combined, and the rest of the switch positions were giving nothing but silence.

So I look at the diagram and check the switch and realise that the wiring on the diagram needs a different switch, so I get yet another diagram and set about desoldering and re-wiring.

And this time it works. Which pleases me.

Now I need to re-string it and set it up left-handed as J injured his hand a while ago and is finding it easier to play left-handed now.

ETA: Oh yeah, and none of the knobs I have will go on the CTS* shafts so I need to get new knobs.

*Yeah, the eletronics are waaay better than needs to be in this guitar, but when there's only about a fiver difference between the generic electronics and the good stuff you might as well just get the good stuff.

Squier Strat Body

And here's the Strat body I got off Oli.


Tentative plan is strip, fill in the various holes including the channel that has been cut between the jack socket cavity and the control cavity*, refinish, and then load up an HH scratchplate from Axes 'R' Us with some GFS Mean 90s and wire it up using master volume, master tone and a 4-way blade switch (allowing series/parallel switching). Thinking I may go with black hardware.

*The 'plate has been taken off at least once before (badly, judging by the state of the screw heads) so I'm assuming whoever did it decided they'd rather hack up the body of their guitar than desolder or just plain cut the wires going to the socket.

Body Parts

Went out to get a loaded Strat scratchplate. Ended up with the whole body. Score! Cheers Oli.