After finishing up the pickup swaps in Matt’s White Jim Root and Delonge Strat he gave me his Black Jim Root to do the same pickup swap! EMG’s out and a set of Bareknuckle Blackhawks in.

As I’ve recently made the swap on the White Jim Root this one was a walk  in the park and came together very quickly. The first step was stripping back the guitar, taking off the bridge, taking out the bridge pickup and drilling a hole from under the bridge into the bridge pickup cavity to lock in the ground wire.

After this, I removed the neck to take off the pick guard and mount the new neck pickup. Feed the neck pick up wire through the cavity to the back plate and the re-secure the pick guard, re-secure the neck and then feed the bridge pickup wire through the cavities and then mount the new bridge pickup.

Remove any of the excess cabling from the active EMG’s and wire in the new Bareknuckle and the new ground wire. I chucked a low E string on to check and make sure everything was working as it should (and it was!) and then went to town on cleaning up the body before removing the string and cleaning up the neck!

The old classic… Remove any loose debris from the neck, clean up the fretboard and then get to work on those frets. Starting from 1500 grit paper and ending up with 12000 grit paper to polish up each fret to a nice glass like finish!

This guy ended up with a set of Fender Bullet 10-46 strings on it and it was tuned to (low to high)  DAEAC#E. Finally, adjust the string heights to map across the radius of the neck and then intonate the guitar to bring every string perfectly in tune!

A quick final polish up of the body and we’re good to go!