crafty

Yeah, because who wants to support people earning a living wage and other benefits?

Dude, you could have carved that guitar out of a mahogany tree with a dull spoon by now! Git 'r done!

I think it's a MightyMite part, so it's probably good quality.

The thing is that most of the rave reviews are coming from the guy who sells them. They're decent pickups, but you get what you pay for. If it's a budget build, they're a good value. If you want a good player, you can do better. BTW, I think the necks on those Pacs were actually made by Warmoth, too.

The GFS pickups are of no better quality than what's already in the guitar. I'd go with Duncan, Dimarzio, or EMG. They really don't cost much more and at least you'll get something better than what's in there. A Duncan set like the '59/Classic Stack/Classic Stack would be nice, or DiMarzio Virtual PAF/61/58, or EMG 85/SA/SA would sound very nice in that guitar and get you some of those nice vintage sounds. As far as the trem goes, anything by Wilkinson, Gotoh, or Hipshot are great bridges. If you want to keep the vintage look, the Wilk VSVG is a great piece.

Center is hot, jacket is ground. What's the issue? It corresponds with the hot and ground wires on the other pickups, too.

Oooh! Tube Lotto! 2 x EL34, 1 x 12AT7, 2 x 12AX7

Apply a thin bead of silicone to the top of the slug coil and that should stop any microphonics from the cover. If you ever want to take the cover off, the silicone just peels off quite nicely.

Amp turned WAAAY up, guitar on 1 or 2, depending on if I want it clean or dirty. If you have decent pickups, you won't need them turned all the way up to get a good sound. Anyways, that's how Clapton does it, and it works for me too!

It's a cable that has a center conductor as the hot wire and a braided copper outer jacket that serves as the electrical and shield ground. The pickup on the left is a Gibson 496R. The one on the right is a Duncan APH-1. Those pickups have the same wiring you'll see on your pickups.

Yep. Some people play Peavey, some play Bogner. Your money, your right to spend it.

Try using a 250K pot instead of the 500K on the volume.

The bridge ground goes from the back of the pot with all the grounds to the bridge, the Gibson pickup will have a braided shield-type cable, and the EMG and Duncan will have four conductor wiring.

Sounds nice. Very Fender-like clean and tight with the Marshall bloom. I dig it. Are you developing a cab or combo to go with it or is it strictly just a head right now? I'd kinda like to hear it through a Mesa cab.

I'm still not getting why you're being forced to put a JB in the neck position, which the pickup was never designed for, but I'm too tired to argue. If money's no object and you're lighting your Cubans with a stack of Benjamins, more power to ya... Anyway, good catch on the missing bridge ground on the Duncan diagram. Yes, you need a bridge ground. Solder it to the back of the pot where all the grounds are soldered, then solder the other end to the bridge posts or trem claw. The Duncan and EMG pickups, which is silly because the EMG-HZ line is made by Duncan, use four-conductor wiring. This allows you to run various split, parallel, and series wiring options if you so choose. The green wire is the electrical ground, the bare wire is the shielding ground. Usually the black wire is the ground wire for most single coil pickups and the white or yellow wire is the hot wire. Everything changes with humbuckers. Most have unique wiring codes from manufacturer to manufacturer, but the wiring coding I told you about is accurate. You will need to purchase some hookup wire to complete the wiring. Anything 22 to 26 gauge should be sufficient.

From what I've read, which doesn't mean a whole lot, Kahler's problems didn't stem from people incorrectly installing the trems, but rather cheap copies of the Kahler design flooding the market and putting the company into receivership. I'm just kind of curious about why one would pay up to and over $200 for a bridge that comes with minimal installation support other than "take it to a qualified luthier, who may have never installed one but can probably freehand the route". I see from your website that you've put up a wealth of information and I sincerely commend your efforts, but I think you'd have even better success by developing and introducing a router template and detailed instructions that people can opt to purchase if they'd like to attempt the installation themselves. Yes, you'll have a few people here and there who screw up and mess up their guitars, but no more than the hackjobs who buy a set of EMGs and short out the preamps.

That's an incredibly bad idea. Kahler's have been off the new market for so long that there's probably not very many people around who've used one, much less installed one. Also, yes, a good luthier can do it free hand, but any luthier I'd pay to do it better be using a template. There are few people out there who'll route a pickup route on a Strat without a template. I've noticed that people who build guitars tend to be a lot more detail-oriented than most carpenters and are addicted to their precious cache of templates. Doesn't Floyd Rose and Fernandes include templates with their trems and sustainer systems?

Wow, now I feel like an idiot because I didn't realize how cool it was to watch Doyle play with EC Heckuva guitarist, his picking technique is also reversed. He probably figured out long ago to simply do upstrokes when most righty's would play a downstroke. Most of the time he braces his hand on the bridge. I figure he sounds a lot like Albert King used to sound like playing reversed too.

What kind of "school research" demands that you use the wrong part for the job? If you already have the pickups and don't have the coin to replace them with more suitable pickups, that's cool, but if you're just throwing the pickups at the guitar just because you think it's cool to be different, I think you're throwing your money away. Anyway, regardless of what you pick, you'll need two 500k ohm pots, a five-way Strat switch, a mono jack, and a .047uf cap. You can use this diagram to help you wire up the pickups. However, on the EMG, the red wire is the hot wire and the black wire is soldered to the white wire and taped off. On the 498T, this pickup uses a braided shield cable as the ground and the center conductor is the hot wire. If the in-between sounds on positions 2 and 4 sound very thin, reverse the wires on the EMG and the JB. Ground the red wire on the EMG and the black wire on the JB and the green wires on both will be the hot wires. This is much easier than trying to swap the phase on the 498T with its braided cable setup. Good luck, and I'd really recommend re-thinking those pickup choices. JB's turn to mud in the neck and 490's/496's sound better in the mid.

Are you really trying to build a cross between the Brian May and NIGEL TUFNEL guitars? Dude, one pickup, one volume knob, Floyd Rose, and you'll get some leg tonight for sure...no need to go all the way to 11

Explain, please. Yes.

<hijack> A few weeks ago I saw Eric Clapton and Robert Cray. One of EC's guitarists is a lefty who strings his guitar like a righty, so backwards for him. It was convenient for the tech, though, because all he had to do was flip the Strat over and play it Hendrix-style during the sound check. Pretty cool. </hijack>

You can also just buy a couple of EMG PA2's if you're too lazy to build a simple preamp that's impervious to noise and spurious oscillation

Other than eBay, $100 per pickup for the EMG 81 and 85 are par for the course. Keep in mind that the pickups come with all of the other parts you'll need to completely wire up the guitar, except for the switch, so the extra coin to purchase them new is well worth it.

You can use any of the million diagrams listed on Seymour Duncan's website or GuitarElectronics.com to get your system going. I'm more concerned about your choice and placement of the pickups, though. If I may, I'd use the JB in the bridge, a Gibson 490R or 496R in the mid, and a Duncan Jazz, '59, or another Gibson 490R in the neck. The HZ-H4 isn't a bad pickup, but it'll look really out of place in there and it's output and tone is very similar to the JB anyway. The JB is a poor choice for the neck pickup because it's just too much pickup for that position. It'll never clean up. The same goes for the 498T in the mid, too much. The Gibson 490R is a great PAF style pickup and sounds great in the neck or mid, but if you want to kick it up a little in the mid, throw the ceramic 496R in there. The Duncan Jazz is a great pickup for the neck because it's clean and tight, but if you want a little warmth the '59 or 490R are great up there too.