daan
New member
OK so my first nice guitar was THIS
An 85/86 "JB Player" Strat copy. I had to sell it when I started college, for tuition $ and never saw another one until Ebay started up. I got THIS
Another Strat copy. ANyway when these were new, you could get one like this (alder body/maple bolt-on neck) or an all maple, neck through guitar. I REALLY wanted one of those, but they cost, like, 3X what my bolt-on cost me. I found THIS
The neck is 3 pieces of "rock maple" and the wings are "soft maple". All 3 of the JBP's I've had had similar hardware and electronics (cheap ceramic singles and mini-pots on a single-ply guard) and a heinously bad tremolo.
It's an "Accutune", basically a pirated copy of a Kahler. It's HEAVY (weighs almost a pound by itself) and they usually break, either the frame around the whole thing, or the "tabs" holding the springs on the bottom.
Either way, you can't use the trem after either of those things happen. Plus before they break (and they will) it doesn't stay in tune well anyway. Oh, and when you remove them, they leave behind a GIANT hole:
So... as soon as I got the black one (has it really been FOUR YEARS now? Jeez... in my defense, I've had 3 kids, and gotten laid off and started new jobs twice since then) I planned on upgrading everything. I got a B/W/B guard and a set of rail humbuckers (the set of Hot Rails I wanted would have cost more than I paid for the whole guitar) plus decent pots, switch and input.
I also got a real Kahler (a 3300 fixed, flat mount bridge with fine tuners, I never used the arm on my old trems, but I liked having the fine tuners on it) In order to mount anything after taking off the old crummy trem, what you're SUPPOSED to do is plug the hole, and re-route for whatever bridge you choose.
I wanted an "easy" project, so I ended up getting a special plate that mounts to the body, and the bridge gets screwed to the plate.
Of course, setting the bridge up 1.5mm higher than normal will make it up too high, and you can't back the bridge saddles down enough to not have 1" high action. SO on a normal Strat body, you get a 1/16" neck shim and you're back in business. On this gutar, the neck is part of the body, so either you're back to filling the swimming pool or recessing the plate. I hemmed and hawed long and hard about this (because then I'm chiseling a bigger hole in the guitar to fill it up, and veneering the top to make the patch dissapear) or just using the Dremel router thing I bought a couple years ago and never using. Oh and of course since I'm nobody's idea of a Luthier, while fitting this mess onto here, I managed to break one of the mounting screws off in the body (maple is a bit harder to screw into than whatever the screws the trem came with) and I had to drill out the remains and dowel the hole back up
Also since my guitar has a giant void instead of wood to screw into, I had to get bolts and nuts to attatch the front of the bridge
which meant drilling out MORE wood for the nuts to have somewhere to go
I did all this hack work, assembled it as best it could be and played it a little
It sounded good, other than not being able to intonate it. I knew I had to take it apart and do it again. How does that go, "There's never time to do it RIGHT, but there's ALWAYS time to do it over"?
So this weekend I had a little time off work, so I busted out my Dremel and the router base
I set it up to route out a little more than 1/16", to recess the plate
I had to clean up the edges a little to get the plate to sit in the hole right
Again, none of you should EVER let me work on your guitars....
It's in the right place, it's down low enough now, all I gotta do is replace those HEINOUS screws holding it in place (I managed to lose all the original mounting screws in the last couple years)
I had my helper paint the recessed rout so it wasn't so obvious
So tomorrow if the hardware store has some suitable screws it SHOULD be all together finally. If I had just plugged the hole how many years ago, it'd have been done long ago... Plus now I'm thinking I should paint it white like my original JPB... Must Not Re-Re-Re-start this project again....
An 85/86 "JB Player" Strat copy. I had to sell it when I started college, for tuition $ and never saw another one until Ebay started up. I got THIS
Another Strat copy. ANyway when these were new, you could get one like this (alder body/maple bolt-on neck) or an all maple, neck through guitar. I REALLY wanted one of those, but they cost, like, 3X what my bolt-on cost me. I found THIS
The neck is 3 pieces of "rock maple" and the wings are "soft maple". All 3 of the JBP's I've had had similar hardware and electronics (cheap ceramic singles and mini-pots on a single-ply guard) and a heinously bad tremolo.
It's an "Accutune", basically a pirated copy of a Kahler. It's HEAVY (weighs almost a pound by itself) and they usually break, either the frame around the whole thing, or the "tabs" holding the springs on the bottom.
Either way, you can't use the trem after either of those things happen. Plus before they break (and they will) it doesn't stay in tune well anyway. Oh, and when you remove them, they leave behind a GIANT hole:
So... as soon as I got the black one (has it really been FOUR YEARS now? Jeez... in my defense, I've had 3 kids, and gotten laid off and started new jobs twice since then) I planned on upgrading everything. I got a B/W/B guard and a set of rail humbuckers (the set of Hot Rails I wanted would have cost more than I paid for the whole guitar) plus decent pots, switch and input.
I also got a real Kahler (a 3300 fixed, flat mount bridge with fine tuners, I never used the arm on my old trems, but I liked having the fine tuners on it) In order to mount anything after taking off the old crummy trem, what you're SUPPOSED to do is plug the hole, and re-route for whatever bridge you choose.
I wanted an "easy" project, so I ended up getting a special plate that mounts to the body, and the bridge gets screwed to the plate.
Of course, setting the bridge up 1.5mm higher than normal will make it up too high, and you can't back the bridge saddles down enough to not have 1" high action. SO on a normal Strat body, you get a 1/16" neck shim and you're back in business. On this gutar, the neck is part of the body, so either you're back to filling the swimming pool or recessing the plate. I hemmed and hawed long and hard about this (because then I'm chiseling a bigger hole in the guitar to fill it up, and veneering the top to make the patch dissapear) or just using the Dremel router thing I bought a couple years ago and never using. Oh and of course since I'm nobody's idea of a Luthier, while fitting this mess onto here, I managed to break one of the mounting screws off in the body (maple is a bit harder to screw into than whatever the screws the trem came with) and I had to drill out the remains and dowel the hole back up
Also since my guitar has a giant void instead of wood to screw into, I had to get bolts and nuts to attatch the front of the bridge
which meant drilling out MORE wood for the nuts to have somewhere to go
I did all this hack work, assembled it as best it could be and played it a little
It sounded good, other than not being able to intonate it. I knew I had to take it apart and do it again. How does that go, "There's never time to do it RIGHT, but there's ALWAYS time to do it over"?
So this weekend I had a little time off work, so I busted out my Dremel and the router base
I set it up to route out a little more than 1/16", to recess the plate
I had to clean up the edges a little to get the plate to sit in the hole right
Again, none of you should EVER let me work on your guitars....
It's in the right place, it's down low enough now, all I gotta do is replace those HEINOUS screws holding it in place (I managed to lose all the original mounting screws in the last couple years)
I had my helper paint the recessed rout so it wasn't so obvious
So tomorrow if the hardware store has some suitable screws it SHOULD be all together finally. If I had just plugged the hole how many years ago, it'd have been done long ago... Plus now I'm thinking I should paint it white like my original JPB... Must Not Re-Re-Re-start this project again....
