Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. A late-night call was the starting point of the end of a relationship between a young man and his guitar. His prized Jackson was smashed by a cray-cray now-ex-girlfriend, and his new squeeze sported dull, boring factory pickups. Could the Unbrokenstring Crew salvage anything from what had been broken, and spice-up the rebound relationship?
Here is most of what was left of the Jackson. These pickups sounded pretty cool with his rig, so he wanted a pup transplant. Beyond the bridge, strap buttons, switches, and maybe the neck, this guitar was now firewood.
I’m not into Jackson guitars, but that is some unusual artwork. Maybe a fake?
Now this is a purty guitar! Hope his new girlfriend isn’t the jealous type.
The neck pickup of the Jackson is a DiMarzio Evolution. It measures about 13k ohms.
Yep, it’s an Evolution. Steve Vai, anyone?
I’ll give you three guesses who made this Custom Custom pickup. However, it is a tight fit for that trim ring because the trim ring is pulling the tape off the windings. I can fix that.
The coils read 14.4k ohms, which tells me these are OK despite the rubbing damage. Lidia Daniels wound this pickup!
This selector switch is OK but not needed today. I’ll clean it up and return it to the customer. What a hack job!
One of the broken pieces has this cut-out switch. I’m not going to route the new guitar to add this button today.
We’ll clean this up too and return it to the customer. The blue button would look ‘cheap’ on the deep red guitar.
The cadaver is ready for the body bag. The police can clean up the crime scene. Our job here is done.
The bridge pickup trim ring was scraping against the insulation on the windings. A Dremel tool with a sanding drum created some space in order to set the pickup height properly.
However, the pickup height could not be set because a screw and a spring was missing. I just happen to have here, in my formerly-nicotine-stained fingers, some left-over hardware from another pickup installation.
From this angle, you can see the bump in the pickup windings, and the clearance for the bump carved into the ring.
Yeah, that’s better. Not too shabby-looking, either, after a quick buff and polish.
The factory pickups in this LTD F50 work fine, and will be removed and returned to the customer. I have marked them N for neck and B for bridge.
We’re going in! Everything here seems to be in order. The pickup wiring goes straight to the selector switch. Easy!
This is the DiMarzio in its new home.
All the wiring is pulled through the routes in the body. The guitar is starting to look snazzy!
This does not look a whole lot different than it did before I started.
Pimp My Ride! Y’all have seen new strings and a setup before, so we’re done with this blog. One relationship ended, and another one begun. BTW this guitar sounded FANTASTIC in the hands of the owner!
Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom!
Contact: David Latchaw EE
281-636-8626