[avocado_green]

So I decided to revitalize an old squier fat strat I have.

It is the guitar I learned on, so it has sentimental value. My brother has had it for the last few months, since he has had an interest in learning guitar. Lately, though, the pickups were sounding funny, the switch wasn't always dependable, and the knobs were falling off. I wanted to fix it for him with minimal time and fuss- so I decided to look for a pre-wired pickguard that was affordable. I put my limit at $100 and started looking. Nothing really jumped out at me until I found this site:

Home

I couldn't find much info on them except for a few people that were happy with their pickups. I saw their pre-wired HSS pickguard for $35 and was pretty skeptical. I figured I would give them a chance, at worst it couldn't sound any worse than the stock pickups on a cheap squier. I went HSS because I have never actually owned a guitar with Single coils (My strat was an HH), and the wiring scheme intrigued me:

Position 1- Bridge Humbucker
Position 2- Bridge Single/Mid Single HUM CANCELLING
Position 3- Mid Single
Position 4- Mid/Neck Hum Cancelling
Position 5 Neck Single Coil

I spent some time thinking about it (a few days or so) and then went to the site to order them. I also noticed that they had a set of locking tuners for $28. It was still within my budget, so I decided to give them a try as well. My order was processed pretty quick and I had everything about 3 days after I placed my order.



I am very happy with how this turned out. The Strat looks great and sounds awesome. I would put the sound of this guitar up against a mexican made fender any day. It has that really cool "hollowed out" sound on position 2. The humbucker has a very "classic rock" style tone. You can get a passable metal tone out of it, but that's not what it seems to be going for. The only thing I changed was switching a tone pot out for a kill switch. I would put these pups in line with the "duncan designed" pickups, perhaps a little better.

As for the tuners, I was surprised to see that the opening was very low on the tuner, which allowed me to do away with the string tree. They aren't the most precise tuners I have felt, but they do stay in tune very well. I haven't tried them with a trem yet (my bridge is blocked), but I do bend the strings pretty intensely when I play and they hold up well.

Anyway, hopefully this info is useful to anyone that might be on the fence about ordering these products. I definitely recommend them both, they are a great deal for the price. I took before/after pictures of everything and posted them on my picasa web album here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/nathan.c...edStratProject

Sorry for the long post, hope it helps, though!!!

[FortePenance]

Very nice! I like the Sun sticker on it (Scooby Doo ftw, too).

[Apophis]

Looks nice