Liko

However, many current and past Fenders have the skunk stripe regardless of the fretboard wood. This is done so there's a more solid connection between fretboard and neck, which increases physical strength, creates a more solid tone and allows the neck to adjust for relief more easily. It's also cheaper because the starting process for either fretboard is the same to a milling machine. It's up to you; on a rosewood fretboard it'd be extra work to rout the skunk stripe, but it could look cool.

The aged look (a furniture maker might call it "distressed") does appeal to me, but I agree that a guitar and its player should earn it. Though I like the brand new nitro finish on my new Highway-1, I bought it because not only does it look vintage now (I dropped a vintage white pearl pickguard and black covers/knobs on it; ), it will look more so in 5 years, 10 years, and on and on.

I figured it out; apparently the resistor is simply in series, and the way they did it, to be fast, was simply to solder both leads of the resistor to one lead on the cap and then clip the cap lead. I didn't notice this when I was diassembling the circuit earlier.

I haven't replaced any nuts on any of my instruments, but I tend to like the sound of Tusq nuts best, and they also have fewer problems with binding. However, I have a couple of cheaper guitars with various plastic nuts and the darker tone works well for them as well; they are starting to show signs of wear far faster than my Tusq nuts.

I also like the capacitance feature I have on mine (picked it up at Fry's for $30, it's digital, autosensing and does far more than I need for guitar work).

You may have the pickups wired out-of-phase. Check the wirings at the switch and the volume pot and make sure you didn't reverse the leads on one pickup. The fact you say that the string noise is louder then the tonal output of the guitar makes me highly suspect that's the case if you were serious. Also, if you're playing with compression/sustain, that obviously increases fainter sounds like string noise.

That about covers it. You'll have a switch freak's axe when you're done, but you'll be able to do a hell of a lot with it. Now, if you REALLY want to get complex, you can pick which coil to tap. That would allow you to have hum-canceling variations of neck/bridge SC. But, I shudder to think how complex the wiring would get; you'd need at least one more DPDT to switch neck or bridge coils (I'd switch neck; using the phantom coil of the bridge bucker would be very thin).

So I'm currently shielding and star-grounding a Highway-1 strat. While fiddling with one of the tone pots, one of the tone cap leads snaps off next to the cap. So, I have to rebuild the tone circuit. No big loss; I can upgrade to film caps while I'm at it. However, while getting the old cap off the pot and ground lead, I noticed that some heat-shrink tubing was hiding what turned out to be a 4.7KOhm 1/4W resistor, wired in parallel to only the one lead of the cap. My question is, why? It's wired in parallel to a bare wire, so the bare wire is the obvious path of least resistance. If it were wired in series for a Duncan mod, or in parallel with the cap itself, I'd understand that, but I fail to see what useful purpose this thing could serve there. It may help to give some background on the Greasebucket, because while every retailer can tell you what it does, few can tell you how it works. Having ripped one apart, I feel qualified to at least describe it. The normal tone circuit has a lead from the volume pot or pickup to the wiper lug, and to the "0 position" lug has a capacitor that then feeds to ground. On this Greasebucket circuit, the tone cap is still there (with the added resistor afterwards as mentioned above), but the lead from the pickup comes instead to the "10 position" lug. From there, a treble bleed cap (.001uF) connects that lug to the wiper lug. I can imagine that this makes it extremely hard for bass frequencies to enter the tone circuit, but I'm at a loss to explain how this design change, as advertised, allows you to roll off treble without the bass frequencies getting louder. I guess that's my second question if someone wants to explain it to me. I have a simple Paint-drawn schematic at home, I'll post it when I leave work.