The Bantal Busuk: Pt.3, 4 and a Road Test - justin_guber

The Bantal Busuk: Pt.3, 4 and a Road Test

Bugger.
Just when things got really interesting, my camera was nowhere to be found. What got really interesting? Part 3 of this whole exercise:
Pt. 3: Making Room For A Humbucker - Pickguard cutting
This was tricky. The final product will have a brand new pickguard, but for now I figured I'd widen the existing cutout for the bridge single coil to make room for a humbucker. It's slanted, which should be interesting.
I just wish someone could have told me how tough this material was to cut.
We started first with a stanley blade, Alel helping out (the dude's helping me out on this whole project, actually). But the stanley blade wasn't that strong, so it was taking forever. We also needed to be quite precise since, due to the angled slot, the final cutout would teeter very close to the edge of the pickguard. One false move and it'd be cut right through.
Henry popped over later on, saw what we were doing and commented that the blade's not strong enough. Noticing Saiful's Swiss Army knife, he suggested using that.
"Careful," said Saiful, "you might cut right through the pick..."
SNAP!
"...guard."
Fuck me blind.
However, it still holds, and the humbucker fit neatly, though I can't seem to get it to go upwards straight, angling more towards the bridge. But now with the pickups in place, it's time for:
Pt.4: Wiring and Soldering
After reading through tons of material on-line I pretty much figured out what to do. Originally, I wanted to put a humbucker and two single coils all in series with a volume control for each, only to find out from the good people at Seymour Duncan that it's simply not possible, which I thought as much when I started drawing the schematic.
So, for now, I decided to wire the pickups in parallel. I still wanted a volume control pot for each, after all, not much of a fan of a pickup selector. I prefer blending pickup tones together.
One incredibly crap doodle on a scrap of paper later, I called up Alel for his help on soldering. I've never soldered before, so I thought it'd be best to ask someone who has soldered guitar wiring to do it first and just watch and learn.
And by God does it look tricky.
About two and a half hours later, all was done. Whilst Alel was soldering I was polishing the bridge with G&S guitar cleaner which works fucking wonders. The damn thing looks brand new. After soldering all the wires together there was just one thing left.
Soldering the earth.
This wasn't as easy as we thought. For some reason we just could get the damn thing to solder on. By the time we did, it was already 3am, and Alel needed to go back.
But the wiring was done. A quick assembly, a new set of strings, and voila:

As you can see, there's been a bit more sanding, but still a lot of chunks not done yet. And the back still needs doing too. But the aesthetics are not the important part (besides, I always felt Fender's looked better when they're beat-up). The important question is: how does it sound?
Well, weird, at first: when any of the volume pots are fully on or off, the guitar is completely muted. So I brought it over to the Guitar Store in Hartamas to figure out what's wrong only to discover that some of the wires were the wrong way round. Twenty five bucks later, all is fixed. NOW, how does it sound?
In a word: fucking awesome.
This guitar is so close to the tone I'm looking for it's crazy, and all from stock pickups! I put the bridge single coil in the neck position, which sounds a lot hotter than the original neck pickup, the middle pickup is as is, but the star has to be that humbucker: SD$25 at Davies in Singapore and it sounds fucking HUGE. I love it.
The humbucker has brought a bit of a problem though. A weird one. When it's on with any of the single coils, both at full volume, a weird, incredibly thin surf-guitary sound comes out as opposed to the super warmth I was expecting, proving that the humbucker is out of phase to the single coils, probably due to the polarity of the magnets. No biggie, all I have to do is switch the live and earth around on the pot.
Intonation kept running, even after I did the intonation, so I brought it to Guitar store again to change the nut to a nice new bone nut and now it holds the tuning a lot better.
So in love, though, with the guitar as I was, I decided to road test it in Penang, and it worked wonderfully.
Next up will be a set of brand new tuning heads and I'm gonna cut the headstock to make it a bit more tele, and ofcourse keep sanding down the body till it's finished. But for now, this is my go to guitar. I like.

8.9.06 09:22

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