crafty

With carbon fiber and a truss-rod, I doubt you'll have any problems. There's less than 200 lbs. of pressure on the neck when it's strung up, so if you can stand on the neck it's plenty sturdy.

So, why does it matter then?

Was the bleed happening when you had the bridge volume turned all the way down and the neck turned all the way up?

I just think it's hilarious that they've taken EVERYTHING in the shop. It's like, Tony Pro came in one day, gave Ed a couple belts to the gut, and said "we own this place and everything in it according to the NEW lease that you'll sign today." Hopefully he had his horde of Steinberger stuff hidden away in Connecticut. They can keep all those fugly Quicksilvers and Black/Back pickups for all I care. They'll have to fire sale that crapage.

Word is that he actually sold the controlling interest to some good fellas who own a few car lots nearby--and they want him gone. What do you want to bet they're putting in a gentleman's club called the "Bada Bing!"? "Don Corleone, I am honored to be invited to your home on the day of your daughter's wedding."

Doesn't surprise me. He's in kind of a seedy area (for Vegas) and the property values have literally doubled or tripled since he moved there. Probably can't afford the bribes to the local union or consigliere anymore, either. He'd be better off trying to put his store in a resort/casino and billing it as an exclusive, high-end shop.

No, they really aren't. I picked one up at the music store the other day. BFG really stands for Barely Finished Guitar. Horrible instrument that doesn't even deserve Orville Gibson's name on the headstock. Great pickup combo on a real POS package.

How did you get it disassembled?

Anything that says Schaller, Sperzel, or Grover is going to work just fine. Steinberger tuners have the unfortunate tendency to crack because certain structural elements are made of pot metal. Gotoh makes good tuners and other parts, but they're really just Asian copies of Schaller and Grover designs. I personally use Schaller lockers on my Strat. They work quite well enough for me.

I saw some Epiphone LP Studios yesterday at the music store with flip-flop "chameleon" finishes. Might check those out!

You guys are completely missing my point. The coils on EMGs are no different than what you'll find on most passive pickups, except for fewer, though not substantially fewer windings. They use blades and polepieces just like everyone else. The difference with EMG is how they interact with their preamps. The preamps take the output from each coil and use their "modeling" (read: summing amplifiers) to artificially shape the tone of the pickup. The "sterility" of EMGs comes from the fact that they are all designed to sum the output of their coils in the same manner from guitar to guitar. I really don't see a difference in using outboard preamps that will allow you to accomplish the same with passive pickups.

That's what I'd prefer, but would I need to plug the top two holes on the body first? They're slightly closer together than the existing top two holes on the neck, I don't think either lines up with the neck holes as they stand, they're more central. Nope. The new neck plate will cover the old holes. It doesn't matter if the new holes overlap the old ones in the body, either. The strength of the joint comes from the mechanical leverage of the screws in the neck and the reinforcement from the neck plate.

Hmmm...I'd have to disagree with you on the semantics there, Primal. True, most "active" pickups that don't need anything except a power source usually have weaker magnets and a lower output to the preamp, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the windings are that much different. Also, if I took a regular PAF, glued a preamp to the bottom of it, and encased the whole thing in epoxy, does that make it an "active" pickup too? Are EMGs "extra-active" if you put a PA-2 or Afterburner on the system? Anyway, it's a silly argument. Active is active, passive is passive, it just depends on what's coming out of the output jack...

Or you could simply convert the Strat body to four-hole and use a new neck plate. I'd use wood plugs instead of dowels if you're going to drill new holes on the neck. Dowels strip out a lot easier than plugs because of the end grain orientation. Any good wood glue will work, most people here use the original Titebond.

The Studios are great LPs, as are the Vintage Mahogany and Standard Faded. Both can be found for around the same price as the Epi Custom if you look around on the used market. The VM has the same neck as the Studio, but I like the BurstBuckers better. The SF is a Standard without the final gloss coats of nitro. Besides, if you're going to start replacing pickups and possibly refinishing the guitar, might as well start off with the proper ingredients for a genuine LP rather than a plywood copy made in Korea or China or wherever Epi's manufactured now. The Elitist LP from Japan is the only non-Gibson LP I'd consider.

Actually, it depends on your definition of "active". Seymour Duncan, Bartolini, and EMG use fully epoxy potted designs to both reduce feedback and hide their designs, but it's more to reduce feedback and reduce the workload on the internal preamps. An active pickup can feed back on itself very easily if the preamp is located on the pickup and the potting will keep that from happening. It also helps reduce the amount of outside noise that's picked up and amplified by the preamp. There are plenty of ways to make regular passive pickups into active pickups. Several companies sell active electronics and preamp kits that'll do the passive conversion and we see a lot of these with basses especially.

Why don't you just get an LTD Eclipse if you don't like the Epi?

Wow. I thought I'd seen it all! That "wire" that you cut is actually the cable that sends the "hot" signal to the tip of the output jack using the center conductor and the "ground" or "earth" to the sleeve of the output jack by using that braided jacket you also cut. Even if you tape the wire back together, it still won't work unless the jacket is also resoldered back together and neither the braid or center conductor are touching each other. Essentially, you fubar'd it up. Go take it to a tech and pay them more money to fix your mess and install the switch properly, then learn about electricity on something a little less valuable. Best way to wire a kill switch is by using an on-on switch to shunt the hot side to ground, not by trying to cut the circuit. You'll get a nice loud pop when you try to just cut the circuit.

The most important thing I learned in my soldering course back at vo-tech was surface prep. Solder is not an adhesive! It's an amalgam that joins two metal surfaces together at the molecular level. Solder cannot bond with a non-metallic component like glue can, so if there's any non-metallic residue on the surface of either component, the joint will either never bond or fail quickly. A lot of people try to use heat to "evaporate" away any surface contamination, but all you're doing is ruining the component, the surface, and you'll probably make a joint that's doomed to fail.

How big do you want? The last '51 I played had huge, but poorly dressed, frets.

Awesome. You can't go wrong with a Martin or any of the other premium brands like that. It's like they say, nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM. Enjoy the guitar!

Funny, I got the same response when I was lookin' for a part-time job a while back. I think they (like Sears and RadioShack of late) actually want people with very little experience in commission sales so they can train them to work how they WANT them to work now. People who have any kind of experience in old-school sales won't put up with extended warranty quotas, credit quotas, and being treated like garbage by "managers" who barely got out of high school last year and went to JuCo and act like they graduated from Wharton or something. Not to slam on people who went to JuCo, as I did, but you get the idea...

From DiMarzio's website: "The PAF Pro® was created when chops-intensive playing was first starting to happen, and high-gain amps and rack systems were getting popular. A pickup was needed that combined a lot of presence and "cut" with an open-sounding PAF® vibe. The transparency of its sound lets the PAF Pro® slice through heavy processing, where darker-sounding pickups get lost in the mud of the effects chain." Anyway, a lot of manufacturers were putting DiMarzios in their guitars back in the late '80s and early '90s, now Parker and Ibanez are really the only ones still installing them from the factory. Too bad, 'cause I think they're a lot better than Duncans for the modern player who's using solid state and hybrid amps with either built-in or external modeling systems. Most of the pickups Larry DiMarzio designed after the high-output series were designed specifically to be used with modern equipment. A lot of people don't know that he learned the craft from Bill Lawrence back in the '70s, too. Now, I'm not a Duncan hater by any means and I used to run them in all my guitars, but I really think the DiMarzios are better for use with modern equipment than the glorified rewinds and overwinds that Seymour's been putting out for 30 years. I think a lot of people like Ed Roman started this whole anti-DiMarzio hubris about 10 years ago and everyone's been saying Duncan's the best ever since.

I have a friend who has an old Blueridge, made back before Saga bought 'em out, and I gotta say it's one of the crappiest guitars you can buy for the money. That was the first guitar I fitted a new nut to because the old one just cracked and popped off a big chunk one day and the crappy tuners fell apart. My friend now rolls a Taylor 810CE. True pre-war style uses thinner and fewer bracing strips and thinner tops. You can't use modern heavy-gauge strings on pre-war guitars or their modern copies like Collings or Santa Cruz.

Did you build that body or did it come to you like that? Is it wood or composite?