[:project guitar:]

Now that the parts mentioned in the previous post are done, we can start on the assembly of the electronic parts.

The kit comes with some of the bits pre-assembled such as all the parts on the control plate etc. For various reasons I have decided to replace these so was starting from individual parts. These are:

• Control plate itself (black in my case)
• Output jack plate (black) and socket
• Neck and bridge pickups
• Volume and tone “pots” (potentiometers) – “audio” type for the volume and “linear” for the tone. (I’ll go into this in a bit more detail in a future post)
• Capacitors – one 0.001 uF and one 0.047 uF. (The u should be a ‘micro’ symbol like the Greek mu – it is microFarads)
• 3 way switch for selecting pickups (switch towards bridge = bridge pickup only, towards neck = neck pickup only, and in middle = both pickups active)
• Knobs for the volume and tone pots, and for the switch
• Wire

With the help of some wiring diagrams and abstract thought it was “relatively” easy to put together. In the abstract it’s quite a straightforward concept – in practice it is quite hard to solder accurately all the time and make sure everything is connected properly, as it requires a lot of patience and attention to detail (2 things I’m not very good at!) – Have a look at this link if you need more information on soldering: Soldering 101. As there are only 2 pickups, one tone and one volume it’s a much simpler concept than a Strat, for example.

We partly assembled everything onto the control plate to keep it in place whilst doing the wiring – no knobs etc, just the essential parts to keep it where it should be – including masking tape for the switch!

In the next post I’ll go into a bit more detail on the actual wiring scheme etc in a bit more abstract way (moving away from the actual detail of soldering)

Once the wiring was mostly done, the output jack could be fixed in place on the body, with the plate. It needs to be mounted securely to the plate, otherwise any time it moves around it will be moving the wires around inside the body, eventually loosening some of the connections. So to keep everything where it should be it’s quite important to make sure it can’t move around too much when the lead is in there.