Wattage
High Voltologist
Love this guitar but the weight limited how much I used it so I decided to put it on a bit of a diet without doing anything too extraordinary.
This simplest way to immediately drop some weight was to swap out the Ibanez “Fancy” tailpiece for a Gotoh light weight aluminum one, a savings of 5 oz.!
I was going to try a few different pickups in the bridge position separately from the weight issue because while I think the Super 80’s look great with the “Flying Fingers” cover their vintage output/ceramic mag combo just doesn’t do it for me in the bridge. As it turns out the Super 80 weighs 5.5oz compared to the 3.3 of the Dimarzio Dual Sound/Super D I dropped in so I saved another 2.2oz.
Seeing how much the Super 80 weighed I decided to ditch the middle pickup. I did use it but only to fatten up the bridge position and with the upgraded pickup in there I wasn’t concerned about it sonically, I did want to keep the look together though. I had a spare Flying Fingers cover in the part drawer so I scavenged and Epi base plate from the scrap pile and soldered the cover on. That blank only weighed an ounce so I knocked off another 4.5oz.
While I had it apart I cleaned up the middle pickup rout. The rout isn’t original and it wasn’t done all that well so I evened that up and took it down closer to the factory routs in depth, I removed about .75oz doing that.
Cleaning up the wiring, changing out the stock volume pots for SD/Bourns, and adding Sprague caps was a wash but overall I made it far better - more controllable and user friendly while knocking off a hair over ¾ of a pound.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like a lot but you can definitely feel the difference and there’s always another 2 oz waiting for a neck pickup swap lol
This simplest way to immediately drop some weight was to swap out the Ibanez “Fancy” tailpiece for a Gotoh light weight aluminum one, a savings of 5 oz.!
I was going to try a few different pickups in the bridge position separately from the weight issue because while I think the Super 80’s look great with the “Flying Fingers” cover their vintage output/ceramic mag combo just doesn’t do it for me in the bridge. As it turns out the Super 80 weighs 5.5oz compared to the 3.3 of the Dimarzio Dual Sound/Super D I dropped in so I saved another 2.2oz.
Seeing how much the Super 80 weighed I decided to ditch the middle pickup. I did use it but only to fatten up the bridge position and with the upgraded pickup in there I wasn’t concerned about it sonically, I did want to keep the look together though. I had a spare Flying Fingers cover in the part drawer so I scavenged and Epi base plate from the scrap pile and soldered the cover on. That blank only weighed an ounce so I knocked off another 4.5oz.
While I had it apart I cleaned up the middle pickup rout. The rout isn’t original and it wasn’t done all that well so I evened that up and took it down closer to the factory routs in depth, I removed about .75oz doing that.
Cleaning up the wiring, changing out the stock volume pots for SD/Bourns, and adding Sprague caps was a wash but overall I made it far better - more controllable and user friendly while knocking off a hair over ¾ of a pound.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like a lot but you can definitely feel the difference and there’s always another 2 oz waiting for a neck pickup swap lol
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