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 Here
are some guitars that I used to have but sold or traded in order to finance
another gear purchase!
SOLD 3/22/07 to help finance the
Gibson Firebird V
Mfr Date: I built it in May/2006. This is why it's just called
"red".
Body: Body is from a 1999
or 2000 Fender Lone Star Strat. It's Candy Apple Red and has the
swimming pool routing. I bought the body complete with everything but
the neck, so I had the stock pickups, guard, wiring, etc.
Pickups: This guitar body came
with factory installed Texas Specials, but I've already got an SRV Strat
with them so I decided to change them out. I had a set of Fender
Custom Shop '69s in a drawer so I installed 'em here and sold the Texas
Specials to a buddy to put in his Squier. I love these pickups.
They are what a Strat is supposed to sound like!
Neck: I bought this neck
on eBay a couple years back. I really was in love with the V neck on
my 57 RI so I decided to try to find a similar neck to put on my SRV Strat.
At the time, I just wasn't into the wide-but-flat feel of it similar to a
Gibson slim taper neck. So I got really lucky and got this online for
$350. It seems kind of high, but the neck is from a Fender American
Deluxe V Neck strat and is of very very high quality. I like this neck
a lot and I've seen them bring $500 alone, so I think I did OK. It's
got the V profile, obviously but has a modern radius on the front and jumbo
frets. What could be better you ask? I don't know.
Hardware: Bridge & tuners
are vintage style Strat replacement, actual Fender parts. Saddles are
stock. I got the neck without tuners and the headstock was fitted for
modern tuners, which I don't like. So I bought a set of vintage tuners
and retrofitted them. These holes are too big, so I took the bushings
and wrapped them with thread tape so that they'd fit. Then you just
drill the holes between each one. If I put modern tuners back in the
vintage holes would probably show. But the modern holes don't show
with the vintage tuners in.
Electrical: This guitar
like most of my Strats uses a 250k ohm linear taper volume pot and (2) 250k
ohm audio taper tone pots with a standard 5-way switch. Nothing too
exotic here.
Mods:
-
Added Schaller strap locks,
May/2006
-
Rewired everything under the
hood and shielded per the "Quieting the Beast" mod and changed the pots to
250k Linear taper CTS pots. But this doesn't work with the tone
pots. They don't have enough roll off to them, they just go all at
once, so I changed 'em back to the stock audio taper ones.
SOLD 10/13/07 to help finance the
Gibson ES-333 Project
Mfr Date: Spring 2003
Color: Goldtop
(Officially called "Bullion Gold")
Pickups: Sold with 490R and
498T from my ES-333
See Gibson's Page
here.
Note this model was discontinued in 2005.
Mods:
-
Added Schaller strap locks,
7/2006
-
Volume Pots changed to CTS
500k Ohm Linear Taper, 8/19/2006. However, Gibson or CTS don't make
a 500k ohm long shaft linear taper pot. So I bought a short shaft
linear taper and a long shaft audio taper and took them apart and made a
frankenpot. Worked like a charm.
-
Also installed a new tone
pot. Used an audio taper DPDT push/push pot and switched it so that
it does phase reversal on one of the pickup. This gives this guitar
a cool kind of Freddie King meets Jimmy Page sort of feel.
-
I should also note that when
I bought the push/push pot I was under the impression that it would need
to be "long shaft" as well. But nobody made them. So I set out
to make another frankenpot and bought a long shaft push/pull and a short
shaft push/push that looked very similar. I spent a couple hours
taking them apart. I could have made it work but I would have had to
put the shaft in a lathe and spent more than it was worth to make it
happen. Then to my amazement when I gave in and was just going to
put the long shaft push/pull in there I noticed that there was a lot of
length leftover. So I tried the short shaft push/push and it was
plenty long! It seems that the guitar's top is considerably thinner
by the location of the tone, so I was good to go........ It worked
almost like I planned it that way.
-
Removed the GFS Mean 90's in
favor of a HB sound over the P90. They sounded good, but just
weren't really "me". So I bought and installed Gibson Burstbuckers
(#1 -neck, #2 - bridge) and love them. 12/13/06.
-
Potted the Burstbuckers a
couple times to avoid the microphonic feedback I was getting. Jan
2007
-
After doing an A/B comparison
of this to other guitars, I went back to the long shaft Gibson 300k volume
pot. I still also may put a higher value cap in here to take out
some of the brightness. Took it out to a gig and it still seems a
little bright. 2/9/07.
-
03/31/07 - Swapped the
pickups with the LP Classic. I wanted
to get an idea about what was so bright with this setup, the pickups or
the guitar. So I took the Burstbuckers out of this guitar and put in
the 496R/500T factory pickups from that guitar. I also removed a
resistor that I had put across the lugs of the tone pot to darken it up
and switched the lugs on the tone pot's cap. Not sure why it would
matter which lug you used for ground and which for the cap, but when I
redid the wiring, it didn't seem so bright. The BB's sound great in
the LP Classic and these aren't doing too bad here. It was probably
just the wrong pickups in the wrong guitar.
-
9/28/07 - Removed the pickups
that were in here (496R/500T) and installed the stock pickups from the
ES-333 (490R/498T) at the preference of the future buyer. Selling
this to finance the ES-333 and mods.
SOLD 5/9/08 to finance the
Gretsch G6199 Jupiter Thunderbird Billy-Bo
Mfr Date: February 2006
Color: Metallic Red
(Discontinued Color)
Pickups: Stock Ceramic Humbuckers
from Gibson
See Gibson's Page
here.
Mods:
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