Now it’s time to do a little bit of soldering. And start putting all the pieces together.

It’s all pretty much straight forward. As I had previously cut off the battery portion off the pre-amp I now have to connect a remote battery holder to replace it. I bought some mini connectors (so that I could disconnect everything in case I needed access to any of the parts) and just had to solder the connections between the batt holder and the pre-amp.

With that done I had to feed the wiring through the cavity in the body and hope everything lined up. Fortunately it all went fairly smoothly and all the components fitted in the right places and it was just a matter of screwing the pre-amp in place. Because of the way the battery holder was designed it made it virtually impossible to screw that in place as the surface “plate” is barely bigger than the cavity needed to house the holder, so it is just pushed in place for the present. Luckily I made it a very tight fit so once in place it’s not going anywhere soon.

Pretty simple setup. The only thing not shown here is the connection to the output jack which has already been screwed in place with the wiring fed through the body and connected to the pre-amp unit. You can clearly see the under saddle Piezo pick up in this shot before it was fed through the cavity and out through an access hole drilled through the body of the guitar. Luckily it lined up with the hole I had already drilled in the saddle slot of the bridge.
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Here you can see the Piezo pickup poking through the saddle slot of the bridge.

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All in place. The pre-amp area looks a bit of a mess, but that’s because the unit is designed for an acoustic guitar and not designed for the confines of a solid body.
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This is the back finished with the pre-amp cover in place.
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I have already glued a bone nut in place and roughly slotted it. Next will be the part that will either make or break this guitar cutting a bone saddle and the final setup and intonation.

Stay tuned………. Get it! Tuned, intonation? Yeah I know, pretty pathetic.

rob