After de-soldering the broken switch and soldering in the new one, I removed everything from the cardboard and mounted it into the cavity, which was fiddly but not too complicated, and no broken connections as far as I could tell. Then came soldering back together the battery wires (not too difficult as they were loose away from the rest of the components), and the particularly awkward part; soldering in the pickup wires. That was something of a pain but I got there in the end:
The last thing to do on the electrics was to strip back the earth wire before re-mounting the bridge:
Once the bridge was back on, I put on a single string just to test the electrics - I didn't have too much confidence that it would all work without any problems, so I figured why waste time putting all six strings on! So that was the moment of truth...I plugged it in, and...just as I had feared, scratches, pops, noise. It turned out though that the noise was simply coming from a noisy volume pot on my amp, and the guitar is absolutely fine! All the controls work as intended, and the active circuit (which I had, of course, not been able to test until now) works well too. It now has a full complement of strings, and sounds good so far - although it needs a full setup of the neck, bridge and pickup heights to get the best out of it of course.
A few photos of the finished article:
Hey Steve, looks really good, your blog is fascinating; I had no idea before of the complexities of guitars.
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot - I'm glad you've enjoyed reading it! I never imagined anyone would read it to be honest, so it's really nice to know that people (and not just anoraks like myself) have found it interesting.
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