Sustainer Strat

[Geo]

This was my first electric guitar--a $99 Asian model that even came with an amp! The amp was gutted long ago to serve as the enclosure for a 3W Plexi-style tube amp. Now it's the guitar's turn for a makeover!

The finished guitar will have a sustainer coil sitting on top of the rewound neck pickup. The bridge pickup will also be rewound. (These are possibly the worst pickups ever.) I may rewind the middle pickup later. These pickups have bar magnets and non-adjustable polepieces which are set to staggered heights.

The circuit will allow switching between sustainer/normal mode. In normal mode, you can also use the preamp of the sustainer circuit for a boost. (My rewound pickups came out a lower impedance, ~3k DCR, because of my loose hand-winding style.) The sustainer is driven by the Ruby/Fetzer amp. Also replacing the crappy tremolo and loosey-goosey tuners. The neck, which came with frets that had been leveled but never crowned, got a fret recrowning.

Before...

Check out the fine craftmanship in this carefully-routed neck pocket. Note the crappy little shim: wood which looks and feels like balsa.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3584.jpg

To wind the sustainer coil, I put some bloodwood spacers on the coil, leaving the top 3mm for the sustainer coil.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3714.jpg

Another view...

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3715.jpg

To rewind these pickups without removing the bar magnets, I made this little thing out of iron to go in the drill chuck.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3716.jpg

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3717.jpg

Winding the bridge pickup:

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3719.jpg

Winding the neck pickup under the sustainer coil. I put drops of glue in the sustainer coil as I wound, so it formed a solid boundary to wind the pickup coil below it.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3722.jpg

The finished neck pickup/sustainer unit.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q119/Ge...at/IMG_3724.jpg