So… patience isn’t really my strong suit. The guitar I had planned to turn into my modular hot-swapping prototype is as of yet just a body, and one that needs a lot of work before it can be anything more.

With that in mind, I just picked up a guitar that has been having electrical issues ever since I got it, and the tone potentiometer sticks when I turn it… and that’s just not gonna cut it for me.

I figured I can speed up when I have a prototype and fix this guitar by feeding two birds with one hand! (I don’t like the metaphor of killing birds, and a friend from my ecopsychology cohort said something to that effect and I love it!)

That said, I’m beginning to plan the project out on this awesome single humbucker guitar. Here’s a before pic:

That humbucker is actually 2 humbuckers wired together for a whopping 18.1k pickup… Wow!

Taking Rough Measurements

Trying to figure out what mounting method will work best

Since the magnets can only mount on the bottom surface of the left pickup ring, and the top of the right, even if the magnets came above the plastic on the right the way the left pickup is mounted will give us a better threshold that we can control the height in than the right.

While it’s not much, I want to be able to mount these as close to the strings as possible.

I’m thinking of drilling a hole the size of my magnet (8x4mm) so I can keep it flush with the plastic pickup rings top edge, giving me a few extra millimeters of height.

One challenge I’m anticipating is creating a flat, level surface on the inside of the guitar. I see the advantage here of a router and all those tools… but I think I can achieve the same effect with another pickup ring in the cavity creating a perfect match for the one we insert.

As I was having (and will continue to have) to spend a decent amount of time putting humbuckers in rings, which was always a dreaded task for me, I found this to be the easiest way for me to put it together. My left hand is as pictured, and with my right hand I use a screwdriver to screw it in. This way the spring acts as a guide, rather than a force working against my every attempt to put a guitar together!

So with all this, I’ve now got a pretty good idea of what this project will look like. I’m getting wood to begin trying to model this, still without a router. I’m planning to use a drill and a wood chisel to make the cavities I’ll need.