It all got put together and strung up for the first time and found that the neck angle was too shallow and the strings were touching the GK pickup, so a small neck shim was added.
Then I found:
1)The humbucker was polarity reversed with respect to the single coils
2) The split humbucker wasn't hum cancelling when mixed with the middle pickup, despite swapping the middle and neck pickup in their positions as per the Bare Knuckle guideline sheet for installing a HSS configuration.
3) I was getting no synth sounds from a Roland GR20, though I was getting the guitar sound through the GK cable and the up/down momentary switch was doing the same thing as the up/down switch on my GK2a pickup on my own MIDI guitar.
4) I was getting signals from 3 of the 6 hex pickups on the sensitivity setting mode, but as they weren't triggering any sounds, the GR20 obviously thought it was in synth off mode.
5) The humbucker sound was rather 'meh', and the single coils OK bu not outstanding.
6) The covered humbucker didn't look aesthetically pleasing once the bridge was installed; too large a mass of chrome divided by the thin black GK pickup.
So I first decided to try a different humbucker and Ordered a Tonerider Rocksong, as I know Steve Harris/Arkieboy prefers a more powerful bridge pickup to me.
I obviously took the guitar apart and checked the wiring for faults, but didn't find any. I then tried the components out of the guitar and found that the hex pickup now triggered sounds, so I probably had a short to the shielding in the 13-pin output cavity. So some insulating tape was added to the back of the small PCB on the rear of the 13-pin socket.
By now I'd read more on the web on installing the system, and noted that having the GK board connected when the guitar was just used as a guitar had an adverse affect on the sound, so I bought and installed a Switchcraft 12A jack, which has a simple switch function that breaks the guitar signal feed to the GK board when a jack is inserted.
Over the past few days, the Rocksong has been installed, the middle and neck pickups swapped over, a 470k resistor per single coil pickup fitted to the pickup selector switch to give an equivalent 250k volume pot feel.
As you can see there's quite a lot of wiring to fit in a small space to start with, especially with the two push/pull pots for humbucker coil split and a GK only/GK + guitar selector:
Then once the GK board gets plugged in, it becomes even more busy inside:
And then it's time to push all the wires inside and hope for the best!
Well, it did all go in, and a resistance check on the pickup output indicated they are all fine.
The neck is back on and I finally found the missing volume knob that was hiding right under the back of a sofa.
Tomorrow it will be restrung and I'll fit the Hipshot Tremsetter to help stabilise the trem. It worked well on the Eggle Berlin Pro I refurbished for Steve/Arkieboy as he likes a solid bridge for palm muting. Though that GK pickup circuit needs to be proved to work first or I won't be a happy bunny!
I've set the GK pickup radius to match the 12" neck radius, so it should be fairly easy to get all the GK pickup elements within 1mm of their respective strings, especially as I've cut down some pickup mounting springs to provide a small amount of height adjustment at each end and enlarged the GK mounting screw holes in the scratchplate for them to sit in. I had tried a thin strip of foam rubber, but screwing down on the two ends of the GK pickup left the middle high and the pickup curve radius reduced, with the two E magnets too far away from the strings with the D and G strings too close.
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