It has been long said that American Stratocasters dominate Mexican Stratocasters largely in part through wiring. I have slowly been working on getting all the pieces together to bring her up to par with ANY stratocaster, be it American, Mexican, or Japanese.
I present to you:
What you see is a set of Lace Sensor Hot Gold Pickups, Toneshaper SSS-1 Control Knobs and Switch, and a Graphtech Supercharger Kit for Strats (kit C actually), oh and some strings since I have to tear everything apart to do the changes.
Here is how it looked before:
I love my Fender saddles, but let see if the Graphtech saddles work nicer, I’ll do a write on them in a few weeks and give my worthless opinion.
Well the strings are off and the pickguard is off, there are the Mexican Pickups I am replacing and the pots and wiring:
Here is the Toneshaper system in place. It slips right into standard Fender pickguards, nothing to do but tighten it up:
Next, to wire up the Lace Hot Golds, I try to keep it neat and the Toneshaper is cool because you don’t have to solder any wires, just slip them into their retainers:
Now you see all these little dip switches, they let you configure the wiring, Vintage Wiring, Modern Wiring, Volume mod, Blender Effect, choosing capacitor values and so much more. The instructions pretty much tell you where to set them for each value you want to change:
Now that all that was done, it was time to take off the Fender saddles, I really enjoyed that because it is impossible to clean under the saddles and several years of filth had accumulated underneath them:
Here is how the Graphtech saddles turned out, I like how it looks but only becuase my guitar is black, any other color guitar and I would hate it:
You can barely tell the difference now, except for the obvious pickup change, but the graphite Graphtech nut and string tree doesn’t jump out and grab your eyes and well thats good:
I hope you enjoyed this pictorial, I will have to do a lot of tweaking here and there for a few days to get the intonation and action right and other little things. All in all it took about 3 hours to complete, but only because I was taking it nice and slow to make sure I did everything right. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go play it, because with so many new parts it’s lost a bit of Mojo and I have to build it back up!
