Tuesday, January 03, 2012

And now, for something different.

Picked up a cheap, used Kramer Focus 111S Strat copy of Chinese origin to plant in the practice space so I can get away with riding my bicycle to practice & having a guitar at home.

Naturally, my expectations of build quality were not lofty to begin with.

Neck pickup magnet had liberated itself at some point. Since the neck pickup is where I'm typically switched, repair there became priority.

Light press with a screwdriver handle as the coil assembly sat inverted atop the outer shell fixed up the alignment in a jiffy.

I have some shielded wire that was originally manufactured to connect the antenna to radio frequency PCMCIA cards in hand held computers (from the historical 1990s), it's small diameter and well shielded with a solid core center conductor.

I figured I may as well just rewire the entire guitar for improved shielding.

Cleaned up the wiring too, minimal escalation in wire size and half as many leads.

While goofing around with it I rewired the tone circuits to sit on the bridge and middle pup, though I'm not in love with the caps in circuit I did find the range of tones more interesting, I'll probably recreate this scheme on my Fender, once I decide on capacitors.

2 comments:

MKULTRA said...

Do you want a humbucker for that POS?

crochambeau said...

HAHA! I've been enjoying the single coil sound for a while now. Wouldn't object to exploring a P90 sort of installation. I do have a humbucker or two on hand, but it's actually getting the job done right now (haven't subjected it to huge wavefront/SPL yet)

I certainly don't want to go overboard on this plank. Eventually plan on running a body off with the mill (you know, once it's built...)(hahahaha) and jamming some modified Hammond tone wheel organ pickups into it.