So it was obvious that I needed to remove the pick guard anyway so if you are going to do that, you might as well go for it. The reason why it is called the Boilermaker Guitar is that I have decided to deck it out in Black and Gold, the colors of my Alma Matter, Purdue University. The guitar has a black body and pretty much all of the hardware will be done in gold. In homage to my former college roommate Shane, "here is my specs" (insert Indiana farmboy drawl) for the Boilermaker Guitar:

Body: Black Squire Strat Body

Neck: Carvin bolt on neck with a Maple fingerboard

Tuners: Gold Sperzel Locking Tuners

Bridge: Gold Wilkinson Tremolo

Pickups: Neck: Seymour Duncan Antiquity Texas Hot
Middle: Seymour Duncan Antiquity Texas Hot Reverse wound.
Bridge: Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound staggered pole

Electronics: Custom built from ground up including Star Grounding
and the use of 2 push pull pots to utilize
additional pickup configurations and a fully shielded the control
cavity.

The neck was chosen basically because I really don't like the standard strat headstock. The head is huge and you have to have string trees, which is just plain annoying. The Carvin headstock is a tilt back style, is pretty slick looking and doesn't require string trees (the squire had 2). The absence of the tring trees increases tuning stability as does the graphite nut. The Carvin also comes predrilled for the spertzels, which means less fabrication for me. Additionally it is a 22 fret neck as opposed to the 21 fret stock neck. I added a maple fretboard for its brighter tone and cool look. The Sperzel tuners were included to increase the tuning stability and add mass to the neck to increase sustain. The Wilkinson Tremolo replaces the cheap stamped steel tremolo that came stock. It has a million adjustments so you can set it up just right. It is a lot beefier then the stock unit which should also increase sustain. The pickups are Seymour Duncan's. I went with the antiquity texas hot in the neck and middle positions which is similar to a vintage pickup only wound hotter. In the Bridge, I am putting a Quarter Pound staggered pickup. Once again it has a vintage tone, but about twice the output - I may have to play with the mounting height a bit to try to balance it a bit with the other pickups, we'll see.

I am doing a few different things with the electronics side. First, I am completely shielding the control cavity of the guitar. This is accomplished by lining the cavity in the body with copper foil as well lining the entire underside of the pick guard and tying that into the grounding system for the guitar. This will be extremely important since I am utilizing vintage style pickups, which are not necessarily the quietest things on the earth. Some people even suggest to shield each pickup individually to further reduce the amount of ambient electrical noise they pick up. I decided to forgo this option because shielding the pickups themselves supposedly decreases the brightness, which my whole reason for getting this type of guitar in the first place, and also the fact that it is a pretty delicate operation, and truly I didn't want to experiment on a $200.00 + set of pickups. The next major aspect of the electronics is a modification that utilizes push/pull pots in the volume and neck tone controls. The volume pot push pull switch turns on the bridge pickup and puts it in series with the other pickups in the selector sequence. Putting it in series causes a hotter signal and should really cook with the new pickups which are overwound to begin with. Additionally, it allows for a Bridge/Neck sequence that will give it a similar sound to a telecaster and the ability to have all three pickups on at once. Switching the tone pot reverses the phase on the neck pickup, which cancels out a bunch of the frequencies. This is supposed to produce some cool effects in certain pickup combinations akin to a really hollow sounding guitar. In addition, I will be doing some modifications to the grounding system to increase its safety in case of a malfunction in an ungrounded amplifier. All of these modifications along with discussions can be found on a website called guitarnuts.com - click here.

Next time I should have some pics and a summary of the work done so far.