P90s in a strat are great!
I dont have any sound clips at the moment, but here is a photo of one of my strat projects loaded with warman soapy joes...
Really like that setup
that may well be my next project.
A few questions mrbob, how do the P90s attach to the pickguard?
Also where did you get the pickguard (or did you cut it yourself) and was it preloaded with the P90s..
The more I think about it, the more I wanna put some P90s in my strat.
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Thanks - this one was a rescue job - I picked up a job lot of parts that actually turned out to be three complete squier strats in various states of distress - the complete thread on this one can be found on the squier talk forum (
www.squier-talk.com/forum/squier-stratocasters/10483-squier-strat-project-1-3-a.html)
With regard to your questions, the p90s fix direct to the body - the body was routed out to accept the pups (they are wider than most single or humbucker pups) and a maple shim a few mm thick was bonded in the base of the route. The pickups are soap bar type rather than dog-eared so have a screw fixing through the pup itself into the body, the maple giving a bit more wood for the screw to grab and raising the pup to target level while keeping the mounting springs nice and tight.
The pickguard was a regular strat guard that was recut to accept the p90s - a dremmel is your friend here! As the p90s are relatively wide this takes a bit of care with placement of the neck one to fit it within the scratchplate outline (gets a bit tight on the bass side) and the volume control needs to be shifted down a little - you can get away with glueing thin washers front and back and redrilling the volume pot hole with an overlap to the original, sort of like forming a figure 8 hole - hope that makes sense - the knob covers the washers and overlap hole.
You really need to cut the guard first and then mark the routing and pup positions on the body from the guard onto the body.
P90s in a strat are fantastic - do it!!!!!!
btw - there are lots of wiring mods in this one as well - before any switching started I did what I do to all my strats - put a jumper in to connect the bottom tone to both bridge and middle and replace the tone caps for Sprague orange drops.
I decided that on this guitar I would have my three favourites, with one switch acting on each pickup so as to be easy to remember - i.e. vol control switch for neck pup, top tone for middle pickup and bottom tone switch for bridge pickup:
Vol Switch - this makes the neck pickup actve no matter what setting the selecter is on, thus enabling neck/bridge and neck/mid/bridge in parallel in addition to the stock 5 settings.
Top Tone Switch - this reverses direction on the middle pickup, so that you can switch the phasing when working mid/neck or mid/bridge - opens some trebley 'quack' tones
Bottom Tone switch - This puts the bridge pickup in series with the neck pickup - essentially creating a wide spaced humbucker when neck selected and putting this in parallel with the middle when mid/neck selected - this sounds big with strat pickups - with p90s it is like a steroid fuelled LP!