Installing the neck was not bad at all. I had been terrified because everyone was telling me I had to have a drill press. In the end, I just made marks through the body where the holes should go, shifted them a bit up towards the nut, following advice from Ron Kirn in a strat-talk thread. It seems snug and also straight. Hurrah.
So what's left of the original at this point?
- Body
- Electronics (all)
- Screws for switch (blackened with a sharpie)
Yesterday I strung it up and did a setup. This was delayed a bit because one of the holes for the claw was enlarged and I glued a toothpick in it so the screw would have something into which to sink its teeth (or whatever screws have - threads I guess).I followed the Fender 10 Step Setup as described in Dan Erlewine's book, and Erlewine's other instructions on tremolo adjustment/installation. The only wrinkle was that I didn't have a wooden wedge for the trem block. So I used a bunch of quarters and a dime. It seemed to work, though I felt ridiculous when I was tightening the claw waiting for the coins to fall out. Then I got interested in a Carl Verheyen video about setting up trems, or, as he says he prefers to call it "the wang bar". Apparently he's a famous guy. He certainly plays well and, while the jury seems to be out on whether what he says makes sense, it seemed to work - he sets up the claw in an angle with more tension on the bass side to "counteract" the extra tension of the bass strings. The G bends up a 3 semi-tones, B a whole tone, and high E a half tone. And here it is:
Having done this, and having a fairly easy job setting up the intonation, I decided it plays terribly. It feels really stiff and I have no clue what to do next. So I'm taking it to my great guitar tech on Thursday. As I see it the issue could be
- Neck needs a shim
- Nut needs filing
- Truss rod off
- Generally bad setup, though nothing major like the above
I forgot to mention how much I agonized about the truss rod. It seemed that the neck was bowed so I loosened it. I tried the "string as straight edge" and also used a straight edge. In the end, the truss rod was already pretty loose, so I don't know if loosening it did anything. It seemed to. But I wouldn't be surprised if I did exactly the wrong thing. While I now feel comfortable with adjusting intonation, I still don't get neck adjustments, and I can never tell anything by looking down the neck the way cool guitar guys do. Sigh.Pickup Covers
A bit of weirdness. I bought some generic black pickup covers from allparts to replace the white ones. They didn't fit! The pole piece spacing was off for the bridge pickup, and they were too shallow. Then I learned that imports are 14.7mm high, and can have 50mm pole spacing, as opposed to the usual 52mm pole pacing. I can see that the depth is due to the weird design in which the magnet sticks out of the bottom of the pickup. I'm guessing that Fender had the opportunity to buy 17,000,000 of these cheap from a factory in China and that dictated the dimension. As for the spacing, bleh. That 2mm screwed me up, and I had to enlarge the holes and it looks crappy. However ... a nice guy on strat-talk explained this to me and I did ultimately find what I needed on a UK guitar gear site called axesrus. I clicked through an order and found that the shipping fee was a cool £1,000,000, very funny. However that same nice guy volunteered to mail it to me if I ordered it and had it sent to him! Yet another example of niceness in the online guitar guys community.
The Nice Guy On Strat-talk
The pickup covers arrived in the UK, and the Nice Guy mailed them to me, and didn't even want the money to cover shipping! So now I've saved £1,000,001.82. Perhaps there is hope for humanity. I like to think I would have done likewise.
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