Quote:


A pickguard fridge magnet would hold a lot of big pictures! (grin)



Actually, the ceramic magnets in the cheap imports don't.

I tried it.

They are just rather weak as magnets go...

Mac's crazy stunt:

I once pulled the pickguard off of a cheap import strat copy, one of those @#$% "First Act" branded pieces of unknown wood, and hot glued bits of hard drive neodymium half moon magnets to the back of the pickups.

One cannot just do that willy nilly because the strength of the neodymium is so strong that it wants to magnetically adhere to the back of the original ceramic pickups in either direction with very little "feel" for whether or not you have the North-South polarity of both magnets facing in the same direction.

So I used a Compass to first find out what direction the pickup magnets were pointing. This is extremely important on a strat, for the middle pickup magnet is reversed in polarity from the outer two. That's how you get the "quack" when in the two middle halfway points on a 5-way switch. The middle pickup is not wired out of phase, the magnet is placed the other way round, which amounts to the same thing, the electrical phase is reversed from that of the bridge and neck pickups.

Once I knew the North - South arrangement of the orignal pickups by using the magnetic compass, i did the same with the neodymium magnets in order to find out where North was on each and marked that with a marker. Be careful with these strong neodymium magnets and your compass, for the things are powerful enough to try to remagnetize your compass needle, possibly ruinging the compass. You don't have to put that compass right up against a neodymium magnet to get good needle swing, just bring it close enough to find out where North is.

Once you have all that sorted, just hot glue the magnets to the back of the pickups and put the plate back on the guitar.

The thing was NASTY, boy. Lots of voltage output.

NOT the Alnico pickup sound at all.

More like some sort of Heavy-Metal-on-Steroids kind of sound, wasn't too great through a clean amp, drove the you-know-what out of distortion boxes, compressors and the like, though. And the input to at least one Marshall stack that was in the store at the time.

We dubbed it the "strat from hell".

Hot glue is easily removable, those magnets popped right back off with the judicious application of blow hair dryer and knife.

But after having those neodymiums on there for a few weeks, I think the Ceramic magnets took on a magnetism they never knew they could acquire. Still nasty sounding, but more of it *grin*.

Don't try this at home, kids.


--Mac

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