My Sound Clinic

Sorry for the lack of postage of late, this one took a while to complete!

Its one thing having 6 guitars dotted around, cluttering up your room with minimal space to contain them, but it’s another entirely when one of those is a heap of rubbish that you can’t do a damn thing with!

My Jackson RX10D was in dire need of a make-over, so I gave it one, on a £50 budget I might add. Here’s how:

Firstly, I needed new pickups. If there’s one piece of advice I can give you about pickups it’s not to buy cheap crap. Even if you’re just doing it as a project guitar, replacing the stock parts with other cheap rubbish is a fruitless task… which is what I’d done on this particular guitar’s previous ‘modification’. This time around however I made sure I did it properly. Having said that, I still didn’t go for anything crazy like EMGs or DiMarzios, because even on the most admirable of auction sites they can still fetch a pretty penny. In the end I opted for some Ibanez pickups that somebody was selling off from their project. A QM1 and QM2 to be exact, off of an old S series. Why Ibanez you ask, well 1. I didn’t want to spend a fortune, and 2. I actually quite like the sound of Ibanez stock pups.

A replacement bridge was my next port of call, seeing as this particular model of Jackson came fitted with an old single locking Floyd Rose trem, which is no use to me after a dive-bomb or two, I need double locking! On the original trem you fed the strings through the back of the bridge unit, but still clamped them down at the nut end with the locking nuts, which I found slightly odd, and more to the point – pointless.

The only other thing I bought was a new 3 way selector switch - an entirely aesthetic purchase, seeing as it had the exact same functionality as the old switch, but it was chrome rather than black.

Sanding

After dismantling the beast I began to sand. A word of warning to anybody thinking of venturing into the same world of guitar DIY –
BE PREPARED!! Sanding is a horribly arduous and exhausting job that can take days, even with a power tool. I was working with sand paper that had shards of glass the size of your bloody fist and it still took me a week. A lot of those hours were spent using a power sander, one of which I managed to explode. Don’t ask me why, it was just a stroke of bad luck it seems, but it was a hindrance to my progress to say the least. After you’ve gotten through the layer of varnish there’s an unfathomable amount of paint to get through, much of which is soaked into the grain of the wood itself. Not to mention that there were even more layers of paint than usual on this particular guitar, because of my horrendous attempt at re-spraying it on the previous DIY session.

Quick Tip -

To be quite honest I found that the power sander was good for taking off and loosening up an area of paint, but it seemed to come off with much less vigour when I used a strip of sand paper wrapped round a wooden block which I just applied in a circular motion with my hand on the area that had been blasted with the sander.

The Finish

Rather than bodge it up with another DIY paintjob, I decided to apply my artistic skills (ahem) and bind the entire body with duct tape.

“A tad shabby” you may cry, but in fact the end result was not all that tacky looking. The thing is – paint takes skill, experience, knowledge of products, an appropriate spraying environment and lots of patience; none of which I possess. My previous attempt came out uneven, lumpy, bits of dirt were caught in the varnish, and cracks appeared where I’d been impatient and attempted to bolt on the volume pot and selector switch before the paint had time to harden (eek!).

I applied the tape in horizontal strips, placing it straight over any cavities like the pickups and bridge cavity, and then cutting it out with a Stanley knife afterwards.

I did a quick fit test on the new bridge after it had arrived in the mail, and just my luck –

it didn’t fit in the cavity that the previous bridge sat in. So out came the router. It was actually the bushing that the tremolo arm sits in that was making contact with the underside of the cavity when the unit was in the dive position. I had to make a small semi-circular groove into the wood so it avoids contact.

Looks a little odd, but hey it works, and you can’t see it when the bridge is in place.

Mounting and Wiring

I was planning on using the mounting rings from the previous pickups, but the bolt was the wrong size for the thread on the pickup mounting plate, so I had to mount them directly. This is a much better looking way to mount your pickups in my opinion, but it’s much harder to make adjustments to the height of the pickups once they’re on so it’s best to get it right before hand.

To mount them directly you need to screw them straight into the guitar’s body using wood screws. The pickups themselves weren’t as deep as the cavity, and in these instances you need to raise them. You can use anything that’s non metallic such as cardboard, wood, plastic, foam, anything that the screw can penetrate to thread into the wood underneath. For mine I cut out bits of cardboard and placed them in the cavity,


then placed the pickup on top and rested a long ruler between the neck and the bridge to give me a rough indication of string height to see the height of the pickups.

This is only a rough estimate of course, but it works well. Once you’re happy with the height simply feed the wires through to the appropriate places and screw down the pickups. Now you’re ready to wire.

I had a particularly difficult time wiring these pups because they came off a guitar with a 5-way selector switch, whereas I have a 3-way. This means that I lose the capability to split-coil, and can only use them as full humbuckers, which is fine by me because that’s all I required.

However, because the neck pickup had 4 coloured wires coming off it for a 5-way selector, as opposed to the usual 2 (plus 1 screen), I had to figure out which wires to put together to make it work with my standard 3-way. I followed this step by step guide in order to ‘tap out’ the coils to see which wire corresponds to which function.

After wiring up I switched the amp on…. Nothing. I’d got the bridge wire colours the wrong way round, so out came the soldering iron to try again. Got it right this time, both pickups responded nicely with a percussive tap. I bolted the neck back on, fitted the bridge and strung it up.

Luckily the neck was ok. Usually when they’re taken off for extended periods of time they can warp out of shape, especially when exposed to the cold (mine was left in my garage for a week or two). Needless to say the bridge required a lot of balancing, but then again it did have new parts and was restrung with a 10 – 52 set.

I wish you all good luck on your venture into guitar DIY. Don’t go into it half hearted!

Thanks to all at sevenstring.org for your technical help and advice, I couldn’t have completed it without you.

Share This

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’m not going to lie, Floyd Rose trems are utter bastards to begin with. The first time I changed the strings on a Floyd I was completely baffled, it was just a nightmare. I’d never had one before, never been shown or read how to do it, so I had to take it to the music store and get a tech to show me. When you’ve done it once or twice though it’s easy.

Here’s a quick and easy step by step set up so you don’t get as perplexed as I did, ready to chuck your axe out the nearest window!

Checklist:

• Pliers
• Alan Keys
• Screwdriver (Philips)

Firstly, snip the ball off the end of your strings.

You don’t put your strings through anything on a Floyd, you simply place the snipped tip into the saddle block

and tighten with the Alan key bolt until it’s secure.

You then take the other end of the string and place it through the machine head as normal and bring the string to pitch.

I tend to alternate the order of pitch of string I put on, i.e. rather than go up (E, A, D, G, B, E), I go low E, high E, A, B, D, G as to balance the tension evenly.

As you bring each string to pitch you may realise that the other strings become flat in pitch. This is because all the strings are sharing the tension of the springs that hold the bridge in place. So as one string tightens it releases tension off of other strings so they will begin to detune. Do not worry, once the strings are settled they will become balanced. I recommend tightening each string a little at a time. As you tune each string give them a stretch.

The string will detune, but re-tune it to pitch and repeat the process until you can stretch it without having to re-tune.

At some point the bridge will probably begin to rise,

and this is particularly noticeable if you’re using a heavier gauge of string to the previous set. If you open up the back plate of your guitar you will notice the two or three springs held onto a toothed plate that is screwed into your guitar.

You need to tighten this until the plate of the bridge is level with your guitar’s body. Similarly, if the bridge has dropped too low then you need to loosen the screws so the string tension lets it rise again until it’s level. Remember: this will change the pitch of your guitar, so you will have to re-tune, then re-balance, and repeat until you find the perfect medium.

Finally, clamp the locking nuts down and fine tune with the microtuners on the bridge. Now you can dive-bomb until your heart’s content without losing pitch!! Happy shredding.

Share This