The aforementioned shielding arrived last Tuesday, courtesy of Amazon. I got that applied to the various cavities Friday evening. I was planning on getting to the soldering on Saturday, but life got in the way. Finally got to it Sunday evening. With everything soldered in place, a couple screws holding the pick guard in place, and the supplied EB Slinkys strung onto it, I plugged it into the Carvin V3M combo ... and it played!
However, something was seriously wonky with the tone pot. A quick check revealed pilot error on my part, soldering one of the leads to the wrong connector. Having run short on time, and needing to get some sleep, I decided to save that for this evening when I get home from work.
I mentioned before that I wanted to give the stock bridge a chance, and so I did. As I was tuning it up for the first time, I noticed that the knobs were getting increasingly difficult to turn. A quick look revealed that the nylon (or whatever that material is) spacers between the knobs and the bridge body had torn and were in the process of destroying themselves. Looks like I'll be ordering the J-Custom bridge after all.
One thing I noted when mounting the bridge is that the hole in the body for the ground wire was drilled right where one of the bridge base mounting screws go. Since it was all but impossible to get the wire soldered onto the bridge base, I left it where it would pinch between the body and the base, and reassured myself that the screw would likely bite into the wire as well. There is ground continuity, so it seems to work for now.
The action is horrible, and this doesn't look like an easy design to get set up (need to take the whole bridge assembly apart just to raise or lower the posts). I'm sure I'll be tweaking it for a little while until I can get it to play like buttuh.
It's almost done. Finally.
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