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Post subject: switching pickups on a mexican standard strat
Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 2:38 pm
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I just bought some new samarium cobalt pickups and i'm looking to upgrade my current mexican standard strat with them. These pickups come standard on the american deluxe strat but the volume switch appears to be a lot more advanced than the one on my standard strat. Is this even a possibility to switch these pickups without hacking the $@!& out of my guitar? I just don't want to solder wires onto switches if it's going to harm the pickups. Any advice would be awesome

Thanks,
Mike


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Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 9:28 am
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Mike,
I think you have "mod anxiety". It's OK, nobody wants to go from something working to something that is not, or is worse than what you started with. If your not comfortable with a soldering iron and wiring diagrams, I would recommend you take your purchase to a qualified tech for instalation. You might even find one that will let you watch or give you some tips on what they are going to do.

Strats are great guitars to work on as you can easily pull everything out to work on it and get the soldering iron etc. away from the wood, avoiding damage. You do still need to be concerned about the pickguard as they don't look very good with melt holes in them. I made a cardboard (material of your choice) template that emulates the pickguard layout for the knobs, pickups and switches so that when I make mods, I just put the whole harness in that to ensure proper placement, and no damage to the pickguard.

As far damaging the pickups by soldering is concerned, it is not impossible, but is pretty unlikely. The more probable victims are the pots and switches which can be damaged by too much heat. In Dan Erlewin's book he discusses using heat sinks to avoid putting too much heat into these components. His tool of choice are medical hemostats, which I have found to work very well. This doesn't help with soldering to the shells of pots, but there are ways to avoid that practice as well. See the guitar nuts link below.

Here are a few tips from Mr. Erlewine on soldering : http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/Electro ... ering.html. You may also want to check out the guitar nuts sight for some other great recommendations: http://www.guitarnuts.com/index.php.

Everybodys starts where you are at now. There is ton's of information out there online that can help and there are multiple forums like this one with people who have been there. Hope that helps and good luck.
GB


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Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:47 pm
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Mickman77, some of the best advice you'll ever get on mods is what gary gave you: Go to the Guitarnutz site. Also, check out the forum: http://guitarnuts2.proboards45.com/index.cgi The guys there can help you with anything you could possibly want to do.


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