As a quick recap - this guitar is comprised of an older 80s HSS configuration Dinky, mated with a Jackson Kelly (KE3) neck and bridge. The fact that the neck meshed with the body perfectly has made this the ideal project guitar, and of course yielded the appropriate name of "Dinkenstein". In the previous post, the guitar was fitted with a single Dimebucker, and I had also mentioned fret problems as well. In this session, the electronics went through another change, as well as other fixes here and there.
Dinkenstein, in its current configuration. Can you spot the differences from the last post?
1) ELECTRONICS
The guitar was equipped with a single Dimebucker at the time of the first blog entry on the guitar. But now, the electronics were changed completely. The owner wanted to make the jump to active pickups. He had a spare EMG 85 in his parts stash that he wanted to put to good use, so we started with that. I had a single-coil EMG that came out of an old-school set of 89s... the old type with hardwired connections, unlike the more modern solderless connections that EMG utilizes now. So, the single coil was installed in the neck, with the 85 obviously going to the bridge.
The guitar was equipped with a single Dimebucker at the time of the first blog entry on the guitar. But now, the electronics were changed completely. The owner wanted to make the jump to active pickups. He had a spare EMG 85 in his parts stash that he wanted to put to good use, so we started with that. I had a single-coil EMG that came out of an old-school set of 89s... the old type with hardwired connections, unlike the more modern solderless connections that EMG utilizes now. So, the single coil was installed in the neck, with the 85 obviously going to the bridge.
Close-up of the installed, different-era EMG pickups.
On the inside, a single 25k volume pot was installed, with a 3-way blade switch - nothing else. No tone pots are used, like before. A 25k pot was utilized for volume, as that's the idea rating for EMG active pickups, as opposed to 250k/500k pots commonly seen with passive pickups. This allows for a hotter signal from the guitar, and since this guitar is set up for metal playing, that's ideally what we want.
Gut shot! Not the cleanest wiring work I've done, but there you have it. The battery easily nestles underneath the wiring, with just enough room to spare. Later model Dinkys came with bigger control cavities, but I managed to make it work just fine with this smaller cavity.
Conclusion - the guitar sounds killer! The EMGs brought it back to life, and it can thrash and bash with the best of 'em.
2) HARDWARE MODS
By request of the owner, several hardware components were swapped out, and ideally mixed and matched for a unique, two-tone look. Luckily, this was possible because both he and I happen to have spare parts for the same style of bridge, which will be covered in detail here.
The bridge installed on this guitar (which came out of a KE3 Kelly) is a low-profile bridge - meaning it's a low-profile Floyd Rose licensed bridge. Low-profile Floyd bridges sit and feel differently than the regular Floyds that most players are accustomed to. The main differences are the saddles - the LP bridge has its string locking screws on top of the saddles, unlike the ones underneath on a regular Floyd Rose. The base plate is also much flatter, made possible by the different saddles. These features allowed a much slimmer, lower profile compared to the standard FR, at the cost of weight/mass reduction, which does contribute to its feel. Some players testify that these bridges are more comfortable in comparison, however, these bridges don't have a very good reliable track record. Based on my personal experiences, anyway.
If you remember, my red Jackson DK2M (the one guitar that I talk about way too much, probably) also came with the low-profile bridge - a JT580LP, to be exact. Same style bridge as the one on Dinkenstein. I have since swapped the bridge on my guitar with a standard licensed Floyd, so I had my LP bridge laying around for spare parts. For the record - the swapped bridge performs much better than the LP. I didn't make a blog post about it, however I did briefly discuss it on the CGW Facebook page back in April.
The JT580LP bridge, with swapped parts.
Since my old LP bridge is black, and his is brushed nickel finish, he had the idea of wanting to make it two-tone silver and black. I ran into some minor but interesting problems with swapping hardware between these two bridges.
The Jackson-stamped nickel bridge is made by Takechui, and it was found on certain older Jacksons, Yamahas, Washburns and certain Ibanezes. It looks like a TRS-Pro bridge, although it's not stamped as such. While it's the same style as the Jackson JT580LP, a bit of modifying had to be done in order for the parts to work.
The goal is to use the brushed nickel base plate, and the black saddles from my JT580, thus creating the sleek two-tone look. After disassembling the Takechui, I discovered some interesting problems.
The saddle inserts (for locking the strings down) were these funky L-shaped inserts, which I have never encountered before.
Takechui saddle insert, compared to the regular style insert.
Because of this strange design, these saddle inserts evidently caused stress on the bottom side of the saddles, which resulted in the bottom of them swelling up and eventually cracking apart. Likely from years of string changes and applying tension to the inserts.
Underside of the Takechui saddles, clearly showing swelling and damage on all six of them. Some of them may be hard to tell due to the camera angle, but they all were showing these signs of failure.
The worst of the bunch, clearly.
I thought this was very interesting, as I've never encountered this before. So it's definitely a good thing that the saddles are being swapped over!
The saddles do share similarities, but they have their own subtle differences - including little nubs on the underside of the Jackson saddles that were clearly intended to only work on the Jackson base plate. Allow me to demonstrate:
You can clearly see some differences between the two brands. Obviously, this isn't a big surprise, as we all know different manufacturers do things their own way. I simply find it interesting to examine these fine details between two uncommon bridges from different manufacturers. These low-profile Floyd bridges aren't seen very often these days, as the standard Floyd designs simply seem much more reliable. Getting a close-up examination between the two bridges was a neat experience, and now I am sharing my findings with you, the readers.
As you can imagine, the base plates had some exclusive design differences as well, as you can see here:
Base plates in low-profile trems. No, the nickel one isn't bigger, I was simply holding it closer to my phone.
If you look, you can see the grooves cut in the Jackson baseplate - that is to allow a place for the little nubs on the Jackson saddles to go. I would only assume this is done as some sort of tamperproofing, but I'm not 100% sure of the reason. And also, you can see the Takechui plate does NOT have these grooves. This of course led into the next minor problem.
Note the nub on the black saddle. Attempt at tamperproofing? That's my theory.
So what happens when you attempt to install the black saddles with its nubs still intact, onto the Takechui plate? Well, look for yourself:
Clearly, the saddles didn't mount flush, so this means the saddles had to be modified to fit. Easy enough - all it took was a rotary tool and a few minutes to file the nubs down smooth.
Jackson JT580LP saddles, now 100% nub-free!
After that, the saddles fit nice and flush onto the Takechui plate, and can now be mounted up! As a finishing touch, a black bar was used, which rounded off the two-tone look for the bridge.
Stylin' and (low) profilin'.
The contrast between the gloss black saddles and the brushed nickel plate is a very nice touch, and it looks better than I originally imagined.
The only other problem was the tails on the black saddles were longer than the Takechui saddles, which caused slight interference in the routing on the guitar's body. A rotary tool was used there to shave back about 1/8 to make room, and now it moves freely with zero interference. Sorry, I didn't get pics of it. Plans to refinish the guitar are still in the works, so we're not too worried about the shaved wood inside the route - that will all be taken care of at a later date.
But it didn't stop there - parts were also swapped on the tuners as well, to continue the two-tone theme. The owner had the original nickel tuners, and a set of black tuners. They are all the same Jackson tuners, just different colors. Swapping parts between them was easy cheesy, and didn't need any modifying at all, unlike the bridge.
The nickel washers and knobs were used on black tuners, and it's a nice touch to the black reverse headstock. What do you think?
3) FRET WORK
As I mentioned before, the guitar was in need of some fret touch-ups. Nothing major - some spot levelling and crowning was in order. The last four frets were sitting higher than the rest, as well as a few further down the neck. These problems were causing bad, note-deadening string buzz, which also prevented the action from being lowered. Before, the action had to be set pretty high to reduce the buzz to a minimum, and even then it still wasn't good enough. So, some levelling was needed.
Fret levelling under way. The tape is needed to prevent marks on the fretboard, and to also keep metal shavings from sticking to the neck pickup.
The frets were levelled down and checked with a straight edge, followed by crowning, polishing and a full cleaning.
All better! It polished and cleaned up nicely. The fret buzz was eliminated, and the action was able to be lowered closer to the owner's specs. The guitar was strapped up with D'Addario 9-42 strings, and set to good ol' E standard. Obviously intonation adjustments were needed for the changed saddles... and it came out nicely.
As a result - Dinkenstein is back in action, playing and sounding better than ever! The next step of this project will be a full refinishing, but that's for a later date.
For you other Jackson fanatics who may happen to own a Takechui-equipped guitar, you might want to consider peeking underneath your saddles and seeing if yours are cracking. That of course means you would have to re-adjust your intonation, but I feel like it would be worth your while to make sure there isn't anything breaking under there. Alternatively, if intonation is a concern (or you just don't wanna deal with it), you can use some tape and make markings of your saddle positions, and just simply put them back where they were. It'll at least get you much closer to correct intonation, as opposed to just guessing where they were.
I hope you enjoyed this lengthy post, and I hope you learned something new from it, which is always my goal. I have learned several things during the course of this undertaking, and I anticipate going even further, as I always do.
Check back soon for more posts! And as always, you can reach out to me through my FB page, listed below.
- Kyle Caldwell
Caldwell Guitar Works
Obligatory glamour shots:
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