Well, I did it. Not without adventures. Bottom line, I think it looks and sounds great! Glad I did it. Now for the full story. Captions below each pic.
Set up my really professional work bench, using my case from MF to hold everything, on the couch. Here she is in original condition ready to go. Set up a halogen work light hanging on a music stand for light.
Got it all pulled apart and the original pickguard removed. Put all the screws and little rubber bumpers in sorted piles on the coffee table next to the couch were the guitar and case are sitting. Felt clumsy and not very handy. But managed to get it all apart without yanking on anything too badly or scratching anything up.
Realized that since I had the guitar apart, maybe I should have thought of shielding the cavity. This guitar is not that noisy, but still. So, googled and a thread on TDPRI said you could use regular kitchen foil. So I did. It was much more cleaned up than this pic, and I got some up on top of the body to connect to the shielding on the Fender guard I was using. Seemed ok. More on that later.
All back together for the "after" shot. I cleaned things up on the guitar, wiped down the neck and body, polished up the used but excellent condition guard. I changed out the strings and felt it was my best re-stringing job yet. Set my pickup heights to the measurements I took as I took things apart. Looks good! Ready to test. But . . .
OOPS!! What the heck??!! No sound!!!, on any switch setting. Dang it!!
Pulled the input jack. Looks ok. Called a buddy to talk it out, and no short cuts. Gotta take it apart. Loosened my fresh strings back up, and used a capo on the first fret to secure things. Thinking I was going to have to do some soldering. Got the PG out without scratching everything up and everything seems secure. The ground seems tight, input jack wires seem intact, switch seems otherwise good, etc. So I pulled out the foil, then took the guitar over to the amp, plugged it in, urned the volume up and lo and behold, I get noise! Not sure what it could have been other than somehow the foil interfering with something. So, put it all back together, pulled the slack out of the strings around the tuning pegs and carefully tightened and tuned, checked my pickup heights again, and plugged her in. Sounds great! Hopefully that was it. I will wait until some other time and get some foil tape to properly line the cavity at some point in the future. For now, I will just enjoy!
