Black Squier Strat upgrade

aord43

So I have had my squier strat for 25 years, more or less, and had a hankering to change the pickups in search of as-yet-unknown improved tone.  I don't know precisely what I am looking for but I know there is something better "out there"!
Also my guitar is HSS and I have never liked the sound of that humbucker, although perhaps the problem was that humbucker rather than humbuckers in general, but in any case I decided to go single-coil which meant I could swap the whole scratchplate out for a new one with my preferred wiring, and also made it easier to go back should I want to.

I got a batch of assorted pickups from @Alegree in a recent clear-out including one of his Texan Hailstorm models for the Bridge.  The rest were anonymous except for a couple of Wilkinson models.  
I checked them all and found that they were all opposite phase wiring from the Texan, and were all same phase magnets, except for two.  So I used one of those two as a middle pickup on the basis that it's RWRP from the Texan on the bridge.  The neck pickup I wired in backwards, to achieve same phase as the bridge and again RWRP with the middle.  Hopefully this theory will work.  The other thing I did was make one of the pots a push-pull to add in the bridge pickup, so I can have neck+bridge or all 3 if I want.
There was a slight hiccup with that because I wired it all up nicely with the push-pull as the volume pot, then found that the inside of the body didn't have room for the long switch! Fortunately it would fit if I made it a tone control, so I rewired it to swap those two pots.

I decided to make it all black, including the jack plate, so I bought a batch of bits from Axesrus, and this determined the initial pickup configuration as I don't have enough black pickup covers of the right width as this batch of pickups have a variety of 50mm and 52mm pole spacing (who decided to make single-coil pickups vary in spacing?).  So the Wilkinson neck pickup I was thinking of using remains on the shelf for now.

Since this was a 25-year old guitar and I had never cleaned the neck, it was very grubby.  I cleaned it all up with baby wipes then applied lemon oil well rubbed in and the result is like a new guitar.

Stupidly I didn't take any "before" photos, but here it is in action at Leicester, and here is another.  Thanks to @Legionreturns

Anyway here is the "after" picture.  I am still figuring out how much I like it and whether to try out the Wilkinson neck pickup but initial testing is promising!

Legionreturns

Nice job! I've not looked through those pics in a while. Cheers for the reminder! 

thermionic

Nice job, but lemon oil on a maple fretboard?

aord43

thermionic said:

Nice job, but lemon oil on a maple fretboard?

I wasn't sure what to use but it seemed to do the trick!  After so long unmaintained I had to scrub it clean and the oil brought it up nicely after that.
What should I have used?

aord43

I will see how it goes, maybe I will have to re-lacquer it.

AlexC

Looking good. New lease of life for an old war horse!

thermionic

As maple boards are lacquered, and you're unlikely to have worn through the lacquer on a Squier, the lemon oil probably just loosened/dissolved any dirt as you were cleaning it. It won't have soaked into the wood though, which is the reason for applying lemon oil to rosewood boards.