0.022uF works pretty well for humbuckers in the bridge, and testing confirms it works well for this guitar too. Having said that, my Les Paul has Mullard Mustard caps in, but that’s just because I got a bag of them cheap! The value is far more important than whether it’s Mojo, POI, or came out of a Soviet cold-war bomber. Don’t be taken in by uber-expensive PIO mojo-crap tone capacitors. Tone cap is a cheap 0.022uF poly cap, which looks mojo and works perfectly. Luckily Iron Gear pickups do a really good one called the Smokestack II and it doesn’t cost very much at all. Tapped single coils are not as common as they should be, and I don’t know why because they are brilliant. With a bit of clever switching you can have the best of both worlds. If you use the start and the end instead you get more output and a deeper tone, sort of like a P90. If you connect up the start and the middle, it sounds like a regular Strat. Now your pickup coil has three ‘ends’ – the start, the end and one in the middle. Then you keep on winding until there’s no more room left on the coil and add another hook-up wire. Basically you wind a single coil as normal, attaching hook-up leads to the two ends when you’ve wound your usual number of turns. Well, this is where the little-known world of tapped single coils comes in. The pickup had to look and sound exactly like a standard Strat pickup but also have enough power to solo like a humbucker. The bridge pickup needed some attention though, but I had some strict rules to follow. I unilaterally decided to replace the covers as I didn’t like the logos. The pickups had already been replaced with Wilkinson jobs and the owner was quite happy with the neck and middle. It even has a steel block for the proper mojo. Wilkinson make a rather nice replacement which lines up perfectly with the existing holes but has a slightly narrower E-E string spacing than standard. I had to be careful not to reduce the playable width of the fingerboard, so the rounding over at the end of the frets was kept to a minimum. I usually prefer to add a little ‘tumblehome’ where the edges of the neck curve back in to meet the face of the fingerboard. I retained a little of the original edge wear. It’s an old, low-budget musical instrument, not an heirloom. No consideration was given to retaining the originality of the guitar, as the body is already very badly damaged and the neck is unplayable. The edges of the board were so rounded over that the E strings were unuseable towards the top of the neck, and bending strings was impossible. The worn frets and extreme radius rendered the guitar barely playable. Most significantly, the radius of the fingerboard was extraordinarily tight – around 6.5″.īasically the neck was terrible.Two of the tuning machines were bent and the rest were really worn inside.The string spacing at the bridge was so wide the E strings hung off the edge of the fretboard.The bridge saddles had been replaced with brass ones which didn’t fit properly.He didn’t want to use a humbucker in the bridge position as the guitar had to look stock.The bridge pickup wasn’t powerful enough for the owner, but he did want to retain the characteristic single coil sound, especially the authentic ‘clanky’ in-between position with the bridge and middle together.It’s been heavily used and the frets were completely worn out, but it had a number of other issues which needed sorting out, some of which have been a feature of the guitar since it was made. None of this ‘relic’ nonsense.Ĭontrary to rose-tinted reports that these guitars were better than Fenders, this one was almost unplayable. This is what a working guitar looks like after thirty-odd years. I have no idea how the damage occurred but there are impact marks on the edge of the body which suggest it might have been subjected to a ‘Pete Townsend’ moment. The body has a massive crack in it which almost split the body in half and has been repaired by someone. This particular example is a very road-worn Goldstar Sound in Tokai’s version of Olympic White. The outcome of this was that Tokai supplied Fender with Japanese-made guitars from 1997 until 2015. The guitars were good enough that, instead of suing them, Fender made an agreement with Tokai. The names they chose were a bit weird – Goldstar Sound, Springy Sound and Silverstar Sound, but the guitars were well-made and captured the essence of the original for a fraction of the price at a time when Fender themselves were struggling to make a ‘proper’ one. There are no prizes for guessing where this guitar drew its inspiration from. Back in the early 1980s Tokai started making guitars heavily inspired by well known American designs.
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