Tag: F500T

Misc

Restoring a Schecter Dream Machine Electronics

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This week I had the pleasure to work an a Schecter Dream Machine. It is a really lovely hard-tail Strat with gold hardware. I am not sure about the wood (none of the codes that normally identify these) but the neck might be Pau Ferro (“Bolivian rosewood”). I am rather lost with the body, maybe ash that is stained, or Shedua, walnut,… ?? Any help is welcome so use the comment function to let me know what you think. The main “problem” with the guitar is that the pickups have been replaced with some kind of  Seymour Duncan Hotrail humbuckers – surely good pickups but at leat not my cup of tea for a Dream Machine. The Hotrails required a completely different wiring of the […]

Guitars

A/B Comparing Mark Knopfler’s Schecter to my Strat with the mk-guitar.com loaded pickguard

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In these videos I am a/b comparing two different guitars side by side: Mark Knopfler’s famous sunburst Schecter Dream Machine Strat and my pink part-o-caster, built from a Japanese Squier body in metallic pink with a nice bird’s eye maple neck I bought on ebay some time ago (actually a noname product), equipped with the loaded Schecter-style pickguard with the F500T pickup replicas, and with a prototype of the coming brass Dream Machine tremolo bridges (to be released as it seems at the end of this month, note that this prototype is not finished yet, the release version will be available in chrome or gold plated, like Schecter). Of course these guitars do not have too much in common, the body wood and the kind […]

Guitar in general

Why do certain pickups like Stratocaster pick-ups from the 50ies or the Schecter F500T die so often?

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A guitar pickup does not contain any moving parts, and for this reason it is generally free of mechanical wear and might work for many decades (maybe even for centuries?). Nevertheless, certain pickup models seem to be prone to die earlier than others. One example are Fender pickups from the 50ies or early 60ies. For this reason you will often see vintage Stratocasters with rewound pickups. The same is true for the Schecter F500T – a tapped pickup which consists of two individual coils. It is mostly corrosion of the magnets that kills the pickup The reason is simple. A pickup consists of some magnets and a coil – in case of a standard Fender-type singlecoil pickup we have individual magnetic pole pieces for each […]