From the Home of Tone bench
A partscaster build for Nik
Nik first reached out to me to inquire about some pickups and wiring for a partscaster project he was starting. Cut a long story short, he kindly opted for a loaded pickguard from myself, including the awesome McNelly 'S-Bar' hybrid strat pickup design, wired to a 7-way Strat harness and all mounted to a nice pearloid pickguard w/parchment plastics to soften the colours a little. Whilst we waited for the pickups to be made and arrive, we discussed his project further and he kindly asked me to assemble the whole guitar when everything was ready.
Left handed CIJ Fender Stratocaster - Setup and wiring tweak
Roger kindly brought in his CIJ Fender Strat for a bit of TLC. It had suffered a fall, but thankfully only suffered very minor damage as a result. It had fell head on with an edge on the fretboard, and only damage was the edge pressing the strings into the fretwire. It had marked a couple of frets with the strings, but it wasn't deep by any means so nothing a minor fret level, crown and polish wouldn't resolve. As this is part of the setup process here anyway, to get the very best from the setup and guitar's play-ability, this was no trouble at all to resolve. With a few passes with the leveling file and radius block, those dents were a distant memory and I cracked on with the crown, polish then setup work as normal.
A tidy up for this very cool Epiphone Les Paul Custom Pro
Wrapped up the setup on this cool Epiphone Les Paul Custom Pro today (Photos were taken after the initial rough in of the setup the prior day). It has had some Duncans fitted previously, and with their open cover style and no pickguard look on the guitar, gives it a cool vibe for sure. Wiring needed a look over as there were some tone pot issues, seems that was just wires touching places they shouldn't so tidied that up and it sprung to life. New control knobs will be on via the owner I'm sure. Frets needed some TLC with multiple high spots, but overall this one came out great and looks ace too. Custom requested a low action set-up on Rotosound 10s, and thanks to the fretwork and good neck angle/alignment that was all achievable. Nice guitar!
Hand cut top nut and setup for a very nice '60 Custom Shop Strat
I have worked on Harrison's awesome Custom Shop '60 Strat before, but in more recent months he has been running BIG strings on it for baritone tuning on standard scale, akin to the likes of Ariel Posen and Joey Landreth for example. But it's time for the Strat to return to standard pitch at E and with it a return to a slightly more common string gauge of 10-48s (we're going for Stringjoy Signatures specifically). So a new top nut was needed along with a tweak to the setup again.
Left handed Custom Shop '59 Relic Strat for a re-wire
Tonight I carried out a pickup swap on a nice 2021 Custom Shop '59 Relic burst strat. The owner also asked if I could double check it's wiring specs as he has a project in the works and wanted to replicate it. Seems from the factory it had true to era 0.1uF tone cap installed, but with a more modern tone pot configuration. The neck pickup having the tone closest to volume all to itself, whilst the 2nd tone pot controlled both middle and bridge pickups. There was also a 2200pF / 100kOhm parallel wired treble bleed mod on the volume. So we'll be recreating those specs for the new guitar when the time comes via one of my harnesses.
