LtKojak
New member
This story might not please purists and snobs, but here it goes anyway:
I got this 2002, one HB guitar for next to nothing, and as wanted a hardtail, I've decided to make it playable... however, pretty soon it became a big project.
Originally, this guitar is a single HB guitar. but being a Bullet, I just assumed it was just like any other... man, little did I know!
When I took out the pickguard, the first surprise: it was routed for a single HB. D'oh! I felt really stupid for a second!
Darn it, I wanted SO BAD a hardtail strat to host a white pickguard with an old-style EMG S set I got as payment for some work I did for a customer of mine, that I decided to go forward with the "project", so... I had to call a friend of mine to do this, as I don't have the equipment or the space to route a guitar body.
He did a swimming pool route for me. While at it, new locking tuners were installed; a fret-leveling, crowning and polishing job was made, and a new nut was installed. The original one had a too small string-spread, so it was extremely difficult to me to make a normal first position E.
Great, now it time to build the pickguard with the EMG set.
It took me a little while, as it came prewired as a harness but with non-functioning pots and switch, so I had to solder everything from scratch, and it went painless until I found out that I've misplaced the stereo jack it uses, so I lost three hours of my time looking for one, as NO ONE SINGLE SHOP HAD ONE in stock in a 2.5 million city like Milano, and as all my parts suppliers are closed in saturday, I had to take a train and a bus to get the only one I could find in a little mom-and-pop music shop in a little town 50 km from the city, all of this with a temperatue of 95° F in the shadow to boot!
Well, finally the pickguard is ready and functioning, so now it's time to install it. Or so I thought.
WHAT? The body's route is too shallow, so it just won't fit because of the switch! You've gotta be kidding me!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Measuring the route, I realize that this body is thinner than a normal strat body, so I only had 5 mm or less left of wood if I had to carve! Plus no equpment to re-route and no friend to ask again, as he left to the beach for the weekend.
OK, Pepe; don't panic... you gotta just take a deep breath, count to fifty and... do things old style.
I took a drill, marked the desired depth on a small bit and I drilled many holes in the calculated 1" by .5" square, to then carve the wood with a chisel.
When I've finished, it didn't LOOK very professonal, but it worked! I was able to fit the pickguard, just to realize that this time it didn't fit the hardtail, so I had to cut, file and sand it until it fitted; which took some trial-and-error, mostly error...
Well, this morning everything finally fit together, straighten the neck, put a D'Addario 11-52 set, radius the bridge to the 9.5" of the neck, set the intonation and bingo! Everything works as it should, it plays like butter and even intonates all over the fingerboard, with no "dead spots" at all, to my surprise for such a low-cost instrument. Here's a full-body shot:
A word about the EMG set: as they have a very weak magnetic field, you can set'em up very close to the strings, so that's what I did... but it just didn't sound like a strat at all! I took my notes and I set the height at the same level I used to in my young days with my old Valley Arts Standard Pro as a starting point, just to witness that the height to the strings was just about the same as the one my PRS SE EG with Zhangbucker REAL single coils have.
Well, this set is as silent as it could possibly be, so it'll be a good choice to record with in my new musical project starting in september.
So, I hope that somebody will find this little story at least entertaining, kinda the ones we like to read in the Sunday morning paper.
Yours very truly,
I got this 2002, one HB guitar for next to nothing, and as wanted a hardtail, I've decided to make it playable... however, pretty soon it became a big project.
Originally, this guitar is a single HB guitar. but being a Bullet, I just assumed it was just like any other... man, little did I know!
When I took out the pickguard, the first surprise: it was routed for a single HB. D'oh! I felt really stupid for a second!
Darn it, I wanted SO BAD a hardtail strat to host a white pickguard with an old-style EMG S set I got as payment for some work I did for a customer of mine, that I decided to go forward with the "project", so... I had to call a friend of mine to do this, as I don't have the equipment or the space to route a guitar body.
He did a swimming pool route for me. While at it, new locking tuners were installed; a fret-leveling, crowning and polishing job was made, and a new nut was installed. The original one had a too small string-spread, so it was extremely difficult to me to make a normal first position E.
Great, now it time to build the pickguard with the EMG set.
It took me a little while, as it came prewired as a harness but with non-functioning pots and switch, so I had to solder everything from scratch, and it went painless until I found out that I've misplaced the stereo jack it uses, so I lost three hours of my time looking for one, as NO ONE SINGLE SHOP HAD ONE in stock in a 2.5 million city like Milano, and as all my parts suppliers are closed in saturday, I had to take a train and a bus to get the only one I could find in a little mom-and-pop music shop in a little town 50 km from the city, all of this with a temperatue of 95° F in the shadow to boot!
Well, finally the pickguard is ready and functioning, so now it's time to install it. Or so I thought.
WHAT? The body's route is too shallow, so it just won't fit because of the switch! You've gotta be kidding me!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Measuring the route, I realize that this body is thinner than a normal strat body, so I only had 5 mm or less left of wood if I had to carve! Plus no equpment to re-route and no friend to ask again, as he left to the beach for the weekend.
OK, Pepe; don't panic... you gotta just take a deep breath, count to fifty and... do things old style.
I took a drill, marked the desired depth on a small bit and I drilled many holes in the calculated 1" by .5" square, to then carve the wood with a chisel.
When I've finished, it didn't LOOK very professonal, but it worked! I was able to fit the pickguard, just to realize that this time it didn't fit the hardtail, so I had to cut, file and sand it until it fitted; which took some trial-and-error, mostly error...
Well, this morning everything finally fit together, straighten the neck, put a D'Addario 11-52 set, radius the bridge to the 9.5" of the neck, set the intonation and bingo! Everything works as it should, it plays like butter and even intonates all over the fingerboard, with no "dead spots" at all, to my surprise for such a low-cost instrument. Here's a full-body shot:
A word about the EMG set: as they have a very weak magnetic field, you can set'em up very close to the strings, so that's what I did... but it just didn't sound like a strat at all! I took my notes and I set the height at the same level I used to in my young days with my old Valley Arts Standard Pro as a starting point, just to witness that the height to the strings was just about the same as the one my PRS SE EG with Zhangbucker REAL single coils have.
Well, this set is as silent as it could possibly be, so it'll be a good choice to record with in my new musical project starting in september.
So, I hope that somebody will find this little story at least entertaining, kinda the ones we like to read in the Sunday morning paper.
Yours very truly,
Last edited:
So I decided to tell everybody what it may happen when you start a project solely based on assumptions and, as the process takes its course, you find out the hard way that they're the wrong ones! 
