...and coincidentally I've been messing around with this.
Better view of the colour;
I've always liked the mid- to late-60s, Special/Melody Maker vibe more than the classic '61 Standard look so there's kind of where I was going with this.
It started life as a faded Special with open coil 490s and it sounded fine, but wasn't really what I was after.
Bonuses from a modding platform point of view are a nice chunky neck, ebony board and perfect on-strap balance.
It's a very fun thing, and at 6.6lbs a lot more chuckable than my 10 pound Les Paul.
Comments
The jury's out on the sound as yet though.
Not that dissimilar to mine.
@guitarcookie1 would have been governed by the location of the long cover. But there’s quite a difference between the two.
It's worth checking your likely string break angle very carefully before drilling, and that also might sway your decision as to how close you need to be to the bridge.
In case anyone in curious, this was the process.
I had to rout out about a quarter of an inch of the forward face of the bridge pickup rout, and just knock the corners off the neck pickup rout. I also glued and screwed in a block of scrap alder as the bridge P90 mounting screws won't reach the bottom of the cavity otherwise.
I've mounted them directly to the body as I didn't want to carve any more wood away than necessary and only had Soapbars anyway. I put dummy screws in the scratchplate afterwards.
I also didn't have a small drill bit long enough to reach the control cavity from the Vibrola screws, so I ran a hidden ground wire from there forward to one of the now redundant tailpiece holes, then cut down and slotted a tailpiece stud to trap it in there, to act as a string ground.
When screwed all the way in it's near as dammit flush with the body.
The Vibrola is an aged nickel Crazyparts one and it's excellent, way better than modern Gibson or Allparts versions. The design is correct, giving a good string break angle, and the spring is properly heavy duty.
Currently for me it's one of those had-to-be-done guitars, and for first Black Sabbath album or Live at Leeds tones it absolutely nails it, but I'm not really sure whether it's going to stay as it is.
I'll certainly keep the guitar though, as now the work is done, tone-wise I can pretty well turn it into any SG I'm in the mood for whenever I have the strings off.
Nice solution to the earthing on yours - mines a bit cruder just running the wire out the treble side stud hole and trapping underneath the spring. It’s all hidden though and allows me to fill the tail piece holes with some mahogany plugs.