One Ring To Rule Them All...

So now for the "slightly long story", as promised in my previous post!

I needed to order a pair of pickup mounting rings in order to mount the pickups into the body, and I wanted, if at all possible, to find a pair that would fit the existing mounting holes that are drilled into the body of the guitar so I wouldn't have to fill the holes and re-drill them. However, finding exactly what I wanted proved nigh-on impossible, especially since I needed flat rings not tapered ones.

To explain a little (without, I hope, going into too much boring detail - or teaching anyone to suck eggs so to speak!) a Gibson Les Paul-type guitar has a tall bridge, which means the neck needs to be mounted at a slight angle to the body, to ensure that the strings run at the correct height and angle over the neck - and therefore the strings run at that same angle over the pickups. This means that the pickup rings on a Les Paul need to be tapered in order that the pickups are held parallel to the strings, not parallel to the surface of the body. My Westone however, has no neck angle, similar to (for example) a Fender Stratocaster, so the strings run parallel to the surface of the body, and hence flat pickup rings are needed rather than tapered ones.

A diagram illustrating the need for tapered rings on a Les Paul can be seen part of the way down this page.

Flat pickup rings seem to be rather less common than tapered ones (I suppose because most guitars that need pickup rings are Les Paul-type guitars with an angled neck), and on top of that, they seem to be made with an almost infinite variety of combinations of the distances between the mounting screws! Many websites simply don't list the dimensions, so I sent numerous emails out, usually to find that the holes were one or two millimetres out from what I needed. After many hours of searching and emailing I ended up ordering a couple of tapered pairs because I simply couldn't find flat ones with the right measurements - with the intention of sanding them flat.

Then, some weeks later, the trembucker was delivered, and it comes with a pickup ring of its own since apparently due to their slightly wider size than standard pickups, they don't always fit a standard pickup ring. So (and you can probably see where I'm going with this) imagine my surprise when this pickup ring turns out to be exactly the right size I need for the Westone, and moreover, it's flat not tapered! So a quick web search turned up a guitar shop in the US (Mike's Music Shop - great service and the fastest order despatch I've ever had!) that sells them individually, I ordered one and it turned up on Christmas Eve! At last, I have all the parts I need to complete the project.