Good evening gentlemen (and the rare lady) :D
I am a long-time troller, first time poster. Though my BKP's are not yet in my guitar, I can now consider myself part of the gang.
But I digress! On to the meaty bits...
I just got done reading the topic about cheap, beginner guitars, and how Squiers are ghastly. I don't want to start a flame war or anything, just tossing my 2 cents on the table 8)
About 6 months ago I purchased a neon-pink Squier Bullet Strat (plywood body+neck. Yes, you read it correctly. Plywood) because I wanted a guitar to massacre with my newbish mod talents. €120. I had ordered the Red-Silver-Blue Lace Sensor package prior on eBay, costing me another €110.
I removed the strings and kept them (good quality cuz the guitar was restrung at the shop when I purchased it). I would later put them back on as there was plenty of extra string to pull through the tuner holes cuz whoever restrung the guitar left like 7-8 turns on each post. Lucky me
First order of business; toss those tremendously shitee pickups out the nearest window.
Surprisingly, the cavity was shielded with some silvery tape stuff. Cool. Checked the wiring; pretty solid. The wires themselves weren't really top-shelf, but as I later discovered, they were sufficient.
I also discovered that the Lace Sensors were larger than the original pickup holes, so I had to sand them out. Took a bloody long time cuz all I had was some pretty fine grit sandpaper available.
Finally I squeezed in the Sensors, wired them up, and checked all connections with a multimeter thingy I also found in a closet. All the grounding was proper, all the connections were unbroken. Great.
Very quickly drilled a hole in next to the pots, randomly chosen location. There I installed a "neck-on" switch. This I wired accordingly so that when activated, the neck pickup would activate despite the position of the 5-way.
Then I re-attached the scratch plate then set to work on the saddles. I had also appropriated a set of Graphtech String Saver saddles (those black things) previously, so those went on without a hitch. Accordingly, I ripped out the old, horrid plastic nut and replaced it with a Graph Tech Trem Nut (same black stuff). Reattached the strings (cuz I'm cheap).
So the strings were now sitting on very slippery stuff, with a magnetic field from the pickups that - apparently - doesn't really pull on the strings much at all. Very good.
The tuners on the headstock were/are incredibly solid. The ratio is a bit unrefined, but they hold steady. Actually, of all my guitars, this guitar is the one that requires the least retuning.
Anyway, to wrap it all up, I plugged it in and checked to see if the pots and 5-way switch made any scratchy noises. Nope, they're fine. They're cheap, but they're fine, cuz I use everything at 10 anyway. The Laces sound marvelous. Good heat on the red bridge, the middle silver sparkles like freshly Windex'ed glass, and the neck blue has a pretty nice, fat tone while keeping that single-coil charm.
And my favorite part after this extraordinarily long-winded and most likely boring essay... is that the guitar sounds like it should be worth 5 times what it cost. The thing sustains very nicely thanks to the Graph Tech stuff (imagine how it would perform with a proper tone wood...), and when I have the bridge selected on the 5-way, with the neck-on switch activated, I get a sound which is as close to a telecaster twang as makes no difference.
Practiced with it alot, gigged quite a bit, and it's fine.
Ok, so I'm not looking for kudos or bashing. Just maybe looking to see if anyone else has done something similar, and is sitting at work, bored, and wants to share.
:)
EDIT: I'll put up some pics of it once I get home, if anyone is remotely interested in looking at a very girly guitar :P
