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Guitar Center - Customizing

E guitar – Wood & hardware – Slick SL 54 (part 2)

Solving bridge problems

In part one I wrote about the purchasing of a light weight issue Strat model with swamp ash body and single hb routing, which I was going to use for slide playing mainly. I started off playing this stock Slick Sl-54 guitar with a heavy gauged flatwound strings and tuned it in D major. Until I noticed that the original bridgepart started to bend over due to the pressure of the heavy gauge strings. And so I decided it was about time to execute the first adjustments on this guitar.

refinishing

I even gave it a nitro repaint later on, mostly to cover up the marks left on the body after filling up the original hb pickup routing. The goldfoil is now mounted on the surface of the body to get the right distance to the strings. So, bridge and Teisco pickup are done, just one more obstacle to deal with. As you can see on the picture above, the pickup poles of the Teisco pickup are much to narrow to use it in bridge position. This causes unbalance in string output of course. Both E strings were way to low in volume. In order to fix this I had to adjust the outside magnet poles of each E string to gain more magnetic field. And so that worked! At least, I had a more or less balanced output now, good enough for slide playing. Here’s another video of the Slick SL 54 after the adjustments.