Fender Jazzmaster Electronics Replacement

Nik Ansell 2010

nikansell00@gmail.com
http://nikansell.posterous.com
A project to replace all the original electronics (Pickups, volume and tone controls
etc) with a custom pre-wired assembly from Rothstein Guitars (www.guitar-mod.com).

My guitar is a 1980s Japanese Fender Jazzmaster, Ive had the guitar for around 16
years and love it. It really suits my playing style well, I play a pretty relaxed style,
blending rock/metal, jazz and whatever, it seems to do it all really well . The only
problem I had is that sometimes it sounds a bit dull and I have to play with my amp
a bit more than I want to get the right sound.
With these new electronics, I get a really strong sound that I can play with a lot
without touching the amp, so for me its perfect.

The New Assembly

I chose to go for the custom S15TM assembly which uses Curtis Novak pickups for
both the bridge and neck. However the key difference when compared to other
assemblies is the bridge pickup, it behaves like 4 pickups in one.
You can use the 4 switches (Highlighted in the red circle below) fitted to the scratch
plate, to control whether you switch any combination of the 4 pickup sections on or
off. This results is an amazing amount of control to the sound, also as you switch
more parts of the pickup on, it naturally overdrives your amp and gives it a beautiful
warm overdriven sound.
All assemblies from Rothstein Guitars can be purchased pre-wired with everything
apart from the pickups attached to the underside of a new scratch plate. This makes
it a much easier job to fit.

Step 1 Remove the strings and bridge

OK start by taking off all your strings and just lift out the bridge, setting to one side.

Step 2 Remove the existing electronics

Next remove all the scratch plate screws with a medium pozi screwdriver and take a
look inside, you can see from the pic below that the pickup covers also need to be
unscrewed before everything will lift out.

Removing the screws with a small pozi driver and lifting off the pickup covers.

Underneath the pickups you will find some foam pad strips, keep all these as they
will be needed later to seat the new pickups.

Step 3 Drop in the new assembly and see how it fits

Put the new assembly in place and take a look around at the fit to the guitar, in my
case I found a few adjustments were needed for it to fit perfectly.
Firstly I noticed that the cables going to the rhythm circuit controls were preventing
the scratch plate from fitting flush around the neck pickup. I simply needed to untape the wires from beneath the scratch plate, this allowed the scratch plate to fall
in place, afterwards the wires can be carefully pushed to one side of the neck
pickup.

Secondly I noticed that the bridge pickup was sitting too high, even without any
foam strips below it. I put on a string to gauge how high it was.

When comparing the two assemblies side by side (below) you can see that the new
assembly on the right hand side below has additional wires on the bridge pickup, all
held in place with a nice chunk of wax.
Some adjustment is needed to allow the bridge pickup to sit at the correct height.
The next step in this project is not for the faint hearted!

Step 4 Fit the guitar body to the new bridge pickup

As we saw in the previous step, the new bridge pickup is sitting too high; I chose to
remove some of the wood body beneath the pickup to allow it to fit at the correct
height.
Flat wood bits make an easy job of removing some wood, obviously I was very
careful not to drill right through to the other side . In order to create a shape close
to the shape of the wire and wax on the underside of the pickup, I used a 25mm drill
at full depth and a 32mm drill at half depth. You can see the step this creates in the
picture below.
If I had a wood chisel at this stage I would have gently neatened up the drill holes,
but I didnt.

The finished product, now its time to fit the pickups.

Step 5 Fit the pickups & set the height

Simply drop the pickups in place, then keep adding more foam strips so the pickups
sit slightly too high, this allows the pickup height to be adjusted using the pickup
cover screws later.
Before:

After:
Fit one string loosely to allow you to guess roughly what height you need and fit the
pickups.
A rough distance at this stage is around 1/8 from the string.

Step 6 Solder to the ground wire to a pot casing

To wire in the new assembly you simply need to solder the ground wire to a pot
casing.
In my case the ground wire was way too short so I extended it a little further first.

The pot is quite big and dissipates heat quickly so you will need to have a soldering
iron big enough to heat the pot, otherwise you will never get the pot hot enough to
melt some solder on it.

Step 7 Fit the scratch plate, pickup covers and bridge

Make sure the scratch plate fits perfectly, then put back all the screws, replace the
pickup covers screwing down to roughly the right height, then drop in the bridge.
Tip1: When putting a screw back, gently turn the screw anti-clockwise until it drops
into place. Try it with a bottle top if you dont get the idea first time. This stops the
screw from chewing up the wood and making it spin without ever getting tight.

Tip2: If a screw does spin without getting tight, simply pad out the screw hole with
a toothpick cut to the right length before replacing the screw, as shown below.

Step 8 Re-string and set the pickup height

Fit your string of choice, you may also want to setup the bridge again (E.G Set the
correct string height/radius and intonation) as this bridge style has a habit of
moving around a lot unless you put lock-tight on the grub screws.
To set your pickup height it is a good idea to have your guitar plugged in, so you can
hear the difference as you adjust.
The height is adjusted by tightening or loosening the four screws to adjust down or
up (respectively) as desired.
The best setting I found was sitting the neck pickup just over 3/16 from the strings
and the bridge pickup just under 3/16. This allows a switch from a nice bright
sound on the bridge pickup to a slightly duller warmer sound at the neck.

Step 9 Grab a beer and start playing

All done, electronics replaced and sounding great!

Another thing you may want to do while you have all your strings off, is to apply
lemon oil to your fret board. I use Dunlop Fretboard 65 Ultimate Lemon Oil and
tend to do it around once a year.It really brightens it up visibly as well as keeping it
feeling nice and smooth when playing,.
You can see from the photo below the difference it made to my fret board.