The Flood and the Fixes

Excuse my lack of posts lately. I got sidetracked due to flooding in my apartment. Some say it was an act of God. I don't know about all that but I can say whoever flooded my appartment can go fuck themselves. Here's a look at some of my tools to give you an idea of what I've been dealing w/:


Oh yeah--good times. I got it all squared away down here to the point where it's actually cleaner than when I started (which wasn't all that clean, admittedly) so I'm finally getting to finishing this project up.

The first step to moving the bridge over is filling the old holes, which is pretty simple. I first drilled them out a bit w/ a hand drill and then I glued some dowels in there w/ wood glue (I just used Titebond; I'm not sure it's the best but that's what I used):


I trimmed of the excess w/ a pair of end cutters:


I then used a grinder bit w/ my dremel to get them down as close to flush as possible. Placing the bridge in approximately the same place as it would be going, I saw that this whole repair would be covered by the bridge so I didn't bother touching up the finish. Maybe I should have but I didn't:


At this point, I redrilled the holes using the same method I drilled them w/ the first time (piece of tape as a depth guide on a hand drill). The "careful measurement" method failed me the first time so this time I used the "eyeballin' it" method to place the bridge. Worked a lot better in this case but I'm gonna figure out how to do it the right way in the future.

Before I put the bridge on, I took the chance to replace the screws I had the p90s in w/ ones of the proper length. It looks much better now:


Then it was just a matter of screwing the bridge on, stringing it up and making some slight adjustments to saddle height and intonation to get it playing well. Looks better than ever:


Getting the bridge pickups at the right height made a huge difference in tone. This thing sounds pretty great even w/ the cheapo twenty dollar pickups so I must've done something right. In the next couple days, I'm gonna take this out in the yard and get some nicer pictures of it and also try to do some sort of summary of the whole project. Until then, I think I'm just gonna enjoy it.