daan
New member
OK it's an early/middle 80's Korean all-maple (3-piece "hard maple" neck, with "soft maple" wings glued on) Strat copy. WHen I got it, it had a cheap single-ply guard, mini-pots and a "box" switch and crummy ceramic singles. Oh and a terrible "Accutune" tremelo.
The tremelos are HEAVY, and break easily-the tabs holding the springs on the bottom snap off, and the trem itself can crack in half. Plus they don't hold tune very well. Taking them off leaves a HUGE hole behind
which if I was better at this, I would have just filled in and have been playing this for about three years now...
Anyway the solution for a "normal" Strat is to get a plate that the new tremolo attatches to
and I did that, and figured out it then stuck up too high to properly set the guitar up. Again, the normal fix for this is a same thickness shim under the neck, but since this is a neck-thru I had to recess the bridge.
It all goes together OK now though. I can't remember the actual model number of the new Kahler bridge I got, it's a "hybrid non-tremolo" bridge but with fine tuners since I basically never use the arm. My understanding is that any of the half-dozen trems they make in this style will just bolt onto the plate if I ever decide to change that out later. (Probably not, though)
I had actually bought a set of Hot Rails for it, but since this sat idle for so long, I sold them (and bought parts for other projects with the $) I ended up replacing those pups with a set of Calig "Cali Rail ST" pickups, which are sort of lilke "Hot Stack" copies. I REALLY like the Caligs in my other guitar (Neodymium strat singles) so I thought I'd give these a try. So far they sound pretty good.
I got a fancy black/red/black guardplate to kind of break up the monochrome look. I wired it up with a push-pull volume to add the neck pup in to do neck+bridge (probably my favorite Strat sound) and a push-pull middle tone to put all 3 pups in series, to sound "big".
The neck is very different from my other JBP (a normal bolt-on one from the same time period) THis guitar has a real wide neck (I had to cut a lot of the pickguard out to get it to fit around the end of the neck) but the back contour is a lot "flatter" than my other JBP. That one is very similar to a real full Strat neck. I should get out my neck-thru JBP bass and take another "family shot", assuming my kids give me enough of a break to, this weekend. Until then I'm letting the new strings settle before doing any final set up. I'm liking it, it's almost like a NGD!
