Fender Jazzmaster Electronics Replacement Nik Ansell 2010 nikansell00@gmail.com http://nikansell.posterous.com A project to replace all the original electronics (Pickups, volume and tone controls etc) with a custom pre- wired assembly from Rothstein Guitars (www.guitar-mod.com). My guitar is a 1980 s Japanese Fender Jazzmaster, I ve had the guitar for around 16 years and love it. It really suits my playing style well, I play a pretty relaxed style, blending rock/metal, jazz and whatever, it seems to do it all really well. The only problem I had is that sometimes it sounds a bit dull and I have to play with my amp a bit more than I want to get the right sound. With these new electronics, I get a really strong sound that I can play with a lot without touching the amp, so for me it s perfect.
The New Assembly I chose to go for the custom S15 TM assembly which uses Curtis Novak pickups for both the bridge and neck. However the key difference when compared to other assemblies is the bridge pickup, it behaves like 4 pickups in one. You can use the 4 switches (Highlighted in the red circle below) fitted to the scratch plate, to control whether you switch any combination of the 4 pickup sections on or off. This results is an amazing amount of control to the sound, also as you switch more parts of the pickup on, it naturally overdrives your amp and gives it a beautiful warm overdriven sound. All assemblies from Rothstein Guitars can be purchased pre- wired with everything apart from the pickups attached to the underside of a new scratch plate. This makes it a much easier job to fit.
Step 1 Remove the strings and bridge OK start by taking off all your strings and just lift out the bridge, setting to one side.
Step 2 Remove the existing electronics Next remove all the scratch plate screws with a medium pozi screwdriver and take a look inside, you can see from the pic below that the pickup covers also need to be unscrewed before everything will lift out.
Removing the screws with a small pozi driver and lifting off the pickup covers.
Underneath the pickups you will find some foam pad strips, keep all these as they will be needed later to seat the new pickups.
Step 3 Drop in the new assembly and see how it fits Put the new assembly in place and take a look around at the fit to the guitar, in my case I found a few adjustments were needed for it to fit perfectly. Firstly I noticed that the cables going to the rhythm circuit controls were preventing the scratch plate from fitting flush around the neck pickup. I simply needed to un- tape the wires from beneath the scratch plate, this allowed the scratch plate to fall in place, afterwards the wires can be carefully pushed to one side of the neck pickup.
Secondly I noticed that the bridge pickup was sitting too high, even without any foam strips below it. I put on a string to gauge how high it was. When comparing the two assemblies side by side (below) you can see that the new assembly on the right hand side below has additional wires on the bridge pickup, all held in place with a nice chunk of wax. Some adjustment is needed to allow the bridge pickup to sit at the correct height. The next step in this project is not for the faint hearted!
Step 4 Fit the guitar body to the new bridge pickup As we saw in the previous step, the new bridge pickup is sitting too high; I chose to remove some of the wood body beneath the pickup to allow it to fit at the correct height. Flat wood bits make an easy job of removing some wood, obviously I was very careful not to drill right through to the other side. In order to create a shape close to the shape of the wire and wax on the underside of the pickup, I used a 25mm drill at full depth and a 32mm drill at half depth. You can see the step this creates in the picture below. If I had a wood chisel at this stage I would have gently neatened up the drill holes, but I didn t.
The finished product, now it s time to fit the pickups.
Step 5 Fit the pickups & set the height Simply drop the pickups in place, then keep adding more foam strips so the pickups sit slightly too high, this allows the pickup height to be adjusted using the pickup cover screws later. Before:
After: Fit one string loosely to allow you to guess roughly what height you need and fit the pickups. A rough distance at this stage is around 1/8 from the string.
Step 6 Solder to the ground wire to a pot casing To wire in the new assembly you simply need to solder the ground wire to a pot casing. In my case the ground wire was way too short so I extended it a little further first. The pot is quite big and dissipates heat quickly so you will need to have a soldering iron big enough to heat the pot, otherwise you will never get the pot hot enough to melt some solder on it.
Step 7 Fit the scratch plate, pickup covers and bridge Make sure the scratch plate fits perfectly, then put back all the screws, replace the pickup covers screwing down to roughly the right height, then drop in the bridge. Tip1: When putting a screw back, gently turn the screw anti- clockwise until it drops into place. Try it with a bottle top if you don t get the idea first time. This stops the screw from chewing up the wood and making it spin without ever getting tight. Tip2: If a screw does spin without getting tight, simply pad out the screw hole with a toothpick cut to the right length before replacing the screw, as shown below.
Step 8 Re- string and set the pickup height Fit your string of choice, you may also want to setup the bridge again (E.G Set the correct string height/radius and intonation) as this bridge style has a habit of moving around a lot unless you put lock- tight on the grub screws. To set your pickup height it is a good idea to have your guitar plugged in, so you can hear the difference as you adjust. The height is adjusted by tightening or loosening the four screws to adjust down or up (respectively) as desired. The best setting I found was sitting the neck pickup just over 3/16 from the strings and the bridge pickup just under 3/16. This allows a switch from a nice bright sound on the bridge pickup to a slightly duller warmer sound at the neck.
Step 9 Grab a beer and start playing All done, electronics replaced and sounding great! Another thing you may want to do while you have all your strings off, is to apply lemon oil to your fret board. I use Dunlop Fretboard 65 Ultimate Lemon Oil and tend to do it around once a year.it really brightens it up visibly as well as keeping it feeling nice and smooth when playing,. You can see from the photo below the difference it made to my fret board.