That’s what I carved into my brand new guitar’s finish last night. “Huh? Why? Are you crazy?”… “Chill”, “cuz”, “no”

OK so I went to Guitar Center on Monday to check out their big sale. I keep reading crazy stories about these sales on the web: Like people getting a $1,200 bass for $500. But, no, I never run into those deal. Nothing even close. I played a few things but nothing was marked down enough for me to give serious consideration to until I say this little bastard:

Ya, its an Epiphone but it was $80 so I grabbed it. I immediately headed over to the accessories department and purchased a Seymour Duncan JB pickup for it too. The pickup almost cost as much as the guitar… oops. Tack on the price of the new tortoise shell pickguard I bought online and you’ve easily exceeded the cost of this little beater.

Anyways… I installed the new pickup Monday night and it was a snap. It sounded really, really good. Plugged in to my Marshall JVM it really nailed some great tones. I didn’t experiment much but without any knob turning it gave me the guitar tone from Dookie. Not bad for a beater. Being pleased with the install I closed up the back control cavity of the guitar and nada. It stopped working. WTF??? I poked around and when I pinched the red and white wires together a bit tighter the sound was back. So, I gave ‘em a snip, restripped the wires, soldered ‘em together. And nothing. I figured I’d fix it another day - it was getting late.

Last night I decided to undo every connection and start from scratch. I cleaned up all the old solder, cut new wires for the connections and went at it. Again, nothing. I connected the pickup straight to the output and that worked fine but for some reason following the wiring diagram wasn’t working. So if i bypassed the volume and/or tone pots it’s all good.

This really started pissing me off. “I’ve done some complicated wiring projects and this 1 pickup guitar’s refusing to work?” Eh, it got to me. I started dropped screwdrivers and wire cutters on the guitar. LOL. Even gave it a few jabs with a screwdriver.

At the peak of my frustration I turned the lil bastard over, grabbed a sharp object and carved “I’m A POS” on it. LOL. I’ve planned on relic’ing this thing up so I consider this a good start. I was was gonna leave it “clean” I wouldn’t have jabbed or carved it but… but ‘eh - it’s an $80.

Every story has a silver lining though right? Right! The good thing about not having this ‘lil project all wired up is the fact that I just stumbled upon this diddy over here:

Now, that’s a pretty fun idea