Pickguard was made out of a Forex board, is a light foam structure plastic. Not very durable as it it a little soft, but will do until I get or make a better one. My son told me that everything works on the guitar. So between last time I posted here and now I did his main guitar also, a Fender Player II that was SSS, and he wanted a humbucker on bridge. Since it arrived, Seymour Duncan JB TB-4 if I remember correctly, I did that too, got previously on reverb an old pickguard HSS. Had to enlarge a little bit the cavity and drill a new hole on one side. Annoyingly factory wiring I guess is done by twisting the wire and solder, so it was a pain to desolder bridge hot from the switch. Kept as much of the original wiring as I could, changed volume pot with a 500k with treble bleed installed and one of the tone pots, had another CTS DPDT push/pull. Left the middle tone pot 250k. Changed the capacitor to 0.022. He didn't wanted coil split so I wired, soldered and isolated red and white from humbucker together. Wanted to see how it works without 470k resistors for middle and neck single coils, so did not put those.
Everything works, he's happy with the sound, so if he want's later to add some mod there is the push/pull there. Before I uninstalled the pickguard I measured the height of the pickups, left and right side, installed at the same height in the new pickguard. Funny thing, original pickguard was white, the old second hand one was initially yellowish, but from UV I guess ended darker, on the red side, no idea what that color is in English. The body is carved for HSH under the pickguard and I think they used black conductive paint.
The screw holes for the pickguard, some of them are loose, this was the first time the pickguard was removed, that is a little on the down side, quality wise, would have expected a better solution than just drill a smaller hole and screw in. Used some shrinking tube on some of the screws, unheated, just small enough so i can screw into the tube. Stayed a little better into the hole, not a permanent fix. Read about that, guess some toothpicks, wooden, some wood glue and drill again would do the trick, but that's for another time, as it takes time and patience is a rare commodity at almost 15 years.
For the pots I removed I ended up cutting the wires, found it hard to heat the original solder and did not wanted to go too hot near wires I was needing to stay on. Will clean it later, the cut was short at the pot, to preserve wire.
Also the pickguard, on the left side where I had to drill a new hole, i have to fill those as now there are 2 and 1/2 holes visible near the screw .
I am happy I had the chance to learn something new and understand some things along the way, that's for me one of the most rewarding experiences.
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