Maple Strat Tremolo/Wiring

This weekend I did the most significant mod on the Maple Strat yet. When I first created the body for my Strat, I was coming off of a bad experience with tremolos. Prior to buying the Peavey Predator, I had borrowed a poorly set-up Kramer guitar with a Floyd Rose tremolo, and hated it. It never stayed in tune. So, when I bought Peavey, I found it had the same problem, so I immediately blocked it with a piece of mahogany. When I built the birdseye body, I built it without a tremolo cavity, as shown at the right. It was also because I was scared to rout one out of the wood, for fear of going through to the pickup cavity. Well, as I was re-vamping the whole guitar, I thought I might as well consider it. After all, I had recessed a trem cover into the guitar, and had re-installed the blocked trem instead of a hardtail bridge.

So on Saturday I took the stripped-down body to my dad’s shop, and using measurements I had made previously, I routed a spring cavity on the back of the guitar.

I acutually used 2 different routers. The first one was for the spring cavity; I used it because it had fine-adjustment that could lower the bit by about 1/64” at a time. I made multiple passes, taking 1/8” of wood at a time, until I had the right depth overall, then I cleaned the edges to a uniform shape, and made multiple passes at the same depth over the floor of the cavity until it was uniform.

Then I switched to a bigger router for the tremolo block cavity. The trem block didn't have enough room to swing, and the bulge on the block where the arm screws in was hitting the back. So I took a larger, longer bit, and gently widened that area (leaving 1/4" before the top), and used a Dremel rotary tool to widen out the little part where the trem arm bulge needed more room.

I sanded everything, and drilled the two holes for the trem screws (using the claw as my guide) and put them in by hand. I just tightened the screws with the springs on them, to avoid the dangerous job of putting them on later.

Then Sunday, I got a reply from a helpful fellow named Brikus at Harmony Central on how to wire my Super Switch for the following configuration:

• Neck Only
• Neck (With Middle in Series)
• Neck and Middle (in Parallel)
• Bridge (with Middle in Series)
• Bridge Only

So I set to wiring it, and it’s done. Only a few more steps on The Maple Strat 2.0!

The last time I worked on the Telecaster, I implemented Series wiring for the middle position. The wiring fought me the whole way, and it ended up being weak and messy. The other problem was that the middle hole of the control plate was unoccupied. So last night I re-did the wiring to include a second tone control, and better series wiring. Now I just need to find that third knob . . . .

Cream Parts

As a major part of the Maple Strat 2.0 upgrade, I’m putting in cream-colored pickup covers, knobs, and a cream switch tip to go with the tortoise-shell pickguard. Well, I bought some cream knobs for $3 on eBay, but they ended up looking like they were made of butterscotch, instead of having been browned by years of air, sun, and skin oils.

Plus, although my Vintage Noiseless pickups came with cream covers, my GFS (for the middle position) has a white cover.

So I set about aging my white guitar parts. I sanded down the white knobs and the pickup cover, and put them in a hot cup of coffee dregs and grounds. They got a yellowish tint to them, but nothing approaching what I needed.

At the same time, I happened to stumble across my last remaining pickup cover from Maple’s original incarnation: a 20-year old Peavey pickup cover! It was yellowed and browned delightfully. It looked fabulous with the pickguard, and even matched the cream knobs.

So I sanded down the Vintage Noiseless pickup cover I would use (I had painted it white for Maple 1.0), and found it was not all that cream at all! It needed to be darkened to match the real vintage pickup. So I soaked it for 2 hours in the coffee solution, and viola! It was now darker, unevenly browned, and looked really old.

The knobs, however, were still not darkening! This was troubling, but with the success of darkening a cream part, I decided to sand the shiny finish off one of the cream knobs and soak it. This didn’t work either.

However, I noticed something about the white knobs I was using. They had yellowed in certain parts, based on the angle they usually sit at on the guitar, and where the sun had hit them.

So my final attempt at having aged-cream knobs will be to set my sanded, coffee-soaked white knobs outside where the afternoon sun will bake them, and forget about them for a couple days.