Changing pickups in my electric guitar

I've had this Fender Squire Stratocaster for probably about a year now, and it seems to be a pretty decent guitar. I bought it used, I'm not sure how old it is, but probably not too old. It has a good neck for a not too expensive electric guitar, and to me, that's the most important thing on an electric guitar. The tuners aren't bad, and the 3 pickups are pretty basic single coil pickups. They work, but they're nothing special. The guitar has a 5 way pickup selector switch, so you can choose which pickup, or combination of 2 pickups that you want to use. If you just use 1 of the pickups, you get a bit of buzz from the lack of electrical shielding in the guitar. I normally select the neck pickup and the middle pickup, with both of them on it cancels the buzz. The bridge pickup has always had a weak sound on this guitar, probably because it was adjusted too far from the strings.
This is what the guitar looks like.

I decided that I wanted to change out the bridge pickup a couple of months ago, so I did some searching for a pickup to replace it with. I wanted to use a double coil pickup, but I didn't want to have to modify the pick guard enough to put one in. The normal double coil pickup is twice as wide as a single coil so I would have to cut the pick guard to fit the double coil in.
I had heard that there are single space double coil "hum bucking" pickups, so I did some searching and found a bunch of listings for them on E bay. The pickup is basically 2 narrow coils in a single coil space. There are 2 types, the bar magnet type and the multi-pole magnet type. I ended up buying a multi-pole type pickup.

I've had the pickup for more than a month now, and finally got the ambition to put it in. I had been delaying the installation because you have to remove the strings to take the pick guard off to do the replacement. I had been using it to try to do some recording, but I haven't been working on that for the last couple of weeks, so I decided to get on with the replacement. I removed the strings and then unscrewed the pick guard and pulled it off the body so that I could get at the wiring for the pickups. At that point, I remembered that I had gotten a Seymour Duncan single coil pickup from Hive account@meno several months ago when I first started thinking about replacing the bridge pickup. I decided that since I had the pickup, I might as well use it also, so I decided to put it in the neck position. Here's the inside of the guitar, and the 2 replacement pickups, ready to be swapped for the original ones.

Once I got the pickups swapped out and the wires soldered into their proper places on the selector switch, I tried to put it back together. I discovered that the bigger wires from the new pickups were interfering with the fit of the pick guard assembly, there wasn't quite enough room for them inside because the cutout in the wood wasn't deep enough around the switch to fit the wires.

I decided that since I wanted to use the new pickups, I was going to have to make room for the wires inside the guitar. That required removing a bit of wood in one spot near the selector switch. The easiest way for me to do that was to drill a bunch of shallow holes in the wood I wanted to remove, and then take a couple of my carving chisels and remove the wood between the holes. I put a piece of masking tape on the drill to act as a depth guide so that I wouldn't drill too deep. There are drill bit collars for that, but I don't have any, so the tape lets me see when to stop drilling. After the drilling was done, it looked like this.

After removing all the wood between the holes and smoothing it out with the chisels and a hobby knife, it looked like this. You can also see the bottoms of the 2 new pickups mounted on the pick guard.

After getting that bit of woodworking done, the wires fit into the guitar with no problems and I was able to put the guitar back together without any more problems.
A look at the new pickup arrangement.

I don't yet know what the guitar is going to sound like, I need to put the new string on it and test it out. I know that the Seymour Duncan pickup is a hotter pickup, so it should be interesting to see if I can tell the difference in the sound. Also, the bridge pickup shouldn't buzz when I'm using it, the double coil setup is is supposed to make it the "hum bucking" type. I guess I'll know once I get the strings on and test it.

Once I get the strings on it and make sure it works right, I'll make a short video to demonstrate the different pickups.

Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!

This is the first post that I've written using the Steempeak front end. It's a bit different from steemit, but not so different as to make writing a post any more difficult. In that respect, it's about the same. It just takes a bit of getting used to.

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