Yet Another Partscaster Build

erratic_assassin

I've been fairly busy with guitar stuff over the bank holiday weekend - I've stripped the electrics on a couple of instruments ready for re-wire & pickup swaps, fixed a faulty volume control on a recently-rewire Les Paul, and finally "finished" a partscaster I've been working on for while: https://flic.kr/p/2sfj7Nk

For context, last year's major project was refurbishing my oldest guitar, a 1996 Squier Strat, and due to dithering over the refurbishment I ended up with a bunch of spare parts, including pickups, tuners and an unfinished roast maple neck.  I figured I might as well buy a body to attach the various bits to and learn about assembling a guitar from scratch... so I did. I found a nice sunburst body from another 1996 Squier on ebay for about fifty quid towards the end of last year and have been farting around with it ever since.  

The neck is from Guitar Anatomy and originally came with a blank/paddle headstock; following advice from this 'ere forum, I ended up spending a good few hours of my Christmas break hacking it into shape with a coping saw and sanding blocks, then finishing it with boiled linseed oil and Feed 'n' Wax. 

Pickups-wise, I originally fitted a set of single coils I've had kicking around for years; they were originally made by a one man outfit called Rock Monkey, I believe? They sound really nice, but quite noisy, even after screening the cavities with copper tape, so I replaced them with Tonerider Apex Plus noiseless single coil style pickups. That still didn't work for me, so I finally gave in and replicated the HSH load I have on my other Squier - all Seymour Duncan, with a L'il 59 at the bridge, Lipstick in the middle, and Cool Rails at the neck. 

I've been patiently collecting the pickups second-hand off eBay for months, but wired up the scratchplate in about ninety minutes: https://flic.kr/p/2sfj7PY  I figured it would be quicker to put together a new scratchplate assembly and swap it over than to replace both pickups & pots on the previous plate, and so it proved. Ninety minutes is a personal best...

The scratchplate in the pic above uses my preferred control layout: the neck and middle pickup share a tone control to free one up for the bridge pickup, to address any potential shrillness in the bridge. The circuit comes from Gerry Hayes's "Complete Guitar Wiring" book. 

I'm sure I'll find something else to fiddle with further down the line, but for now I'm calling it finished: the previous single-coil iterations were a little bit dark, but that darkness translates into some nice meaty rock/metal tones with the humbuckers installed, which is very much my bag.