This Hamer came in after the owner had trouble installing a new pickup. While it was with me they decided to swap the neck pickup too.
The volume pot felt quite scratchy so I swapped it for a new one for reliability. The neck pickup is designed for a Strat with the lead coming from the back of the middle. This looked like it would cause an issue as there was the space for this, quite rigid cable. I managed to squeeze it in and the pickup worked fine. The stock pickup was also surface mounted and the replacement wasn’t, the stock screws worked so there was no need to drill the holes out.
Once I’d set the guitar up I noticed the strings were badly aligned on the neck, being too close to the edge of the fingerboard on the bass side. The bridge was in the wrong place to the neck, and the trem route was out of line in exactly the wrong way. There’s noting I can do about this without essentially rebuilding the instrument but it intonate and plays well enough.
The humbucker was missing its springs so adjusting the height would have been difficult. Replacements installed.
On final test, I found the switch wasn’t working on the neck pickup. It was cheap and probably couldn’t stand the multiple attempts at swapping the pickups. I swapped it for a quality CRL switch.
Setup with Ernie Ball 10 – 46.
