920D Custom Pre-wired P-Rails Pickguard Install (with pics)

Hey, guys,

I recently got inspired by a buddy to install some new pick-ups in an old Mexican-made Strat of mine. I wanted something versatile that could sound like a Strat, but I also liked the idea of P-90s! So, I took out my old MIM Strat and pulled of the old, crusty strings... You can see the frets have some oxidation built up on the frets:



Picture here is the pre-wired Custom 920D pickguard loaded with p-Rails from Sigler Music in its shipping material.... Pretty nice job packing it up:





Here is a picture of the pickguard and controls. Each one of the pots is a push-pull, so they all have different effects on the pickups. If I remember correctly, pulling the volume pot splits the P-rails to P-90s, pulling the neck tone pot splits all of the pickups to the rail-side of a single coil sound, and pulling the bridge tone pot activates the neck pickup, regardless of the 5-way switch position.




Here are some close-ups of the pick-ups:




See the next post for more details!

 

Here, you can see the stock pickguard is removed:








Here is the new, custom pickguard next to the body. It was at this point that I realized a little issue: a standard Strat body is only milled to accept a single coil pickup in the neck position! DOH!! Good thing I was not doing this mod on my American made Strat! Whew!



Here are some close-ups of the frets. You can see that they were pretty well oxidized. I hadn't used the guitar in several years, and that is why I figured that this might be a great donor guitar for this kind of project!!


More details to follow!

 

Unfortunately, I did not take picture of the interior of the body of the guitar after doing some dremel work to widen the neck pickup cavity to accept the neck P-rail! Sorry, guys... I dropped the ball there. I did take a video of my dad doing a little bit of the routing while my hands were free, so maybe I will upload that a little later!

Here, I decided to address the frets, so I covered the whole fret board in masking tap, and I used a razor to cut out holes in the tape to uncover the frets. If you look closely, you can see the dark coloring on the frets, even from this distanced shot. I used the steel wool (#0000) that you can see in the bottom left of the picture to polish the frets.






Here are some pics of the frets before the polishing:




Here are some pics of the frets after the polishing had taken place:




Here is a picture of the pretty little frets after the tape was removed and guitar was restrung:



Here is the pickguard after being installed into the body of the donor Strat!

 

Finally, here is the finished product:





I have played it a little bit, and one thing that I can say is that it certainly does not seem to be as bright as a traditional single coil strat, but not in a bad way; it takes the harsh bite off of the single coil tones while retaining that single coil chime (when in the single coil rail mode). All in all, I have not played around with it much, yet, but once I get a really chance to put her through the paces, I will try to give a review of the pickups.

 

Yeah, it is an interesting system... They tried to wire it up so that you could switch between a humbucking sound, a P-90 sound, and a single coil sound, with the last pot giving you the ability to activate all three pickups at once, or just the neck and bridge pickups at the same time. It is a ton of option! I'm not sure that I will be using all of the different options all the time, because I tend to find a favorite for a few months, then find a new favorite and stick with it a few months, and so on.

How do you like using your P-90s? Do you use them as humbuckers, P-90s, or single coils most of the time?