Fire up the soldering iron.

Engaging in some good old-fashioned DIY this week. With a bee in my bonnet to sort out my black Strat, I decided that I'm sick of paying surly techs at music stores to change pickups and otherwise rewire my guitars, and that I, a fairly capable man, should be able to do this work myself.

In bygone days I tried to do a bit of soldering but really had no idea what I was doing. But now there is YouTube. With a bit of poking around I found some videos on basic soldering and pickup how-tos from Seymour Duncan and Jason Lollar. Readable wiring diagrams were a little hard to find but I finally found a clear diagram on Seymour's site. His site is in fact a valuable font of information, in contrast to the DiMarzio site, which had basically nothing but marketing.

I have a date with a soldering iron at Greg Wyard's place on Friday afternoon - I'm going to change back from the single-single-double Rio Grande set to the original single-single-single set. I never could get with the Rio Grandes, and I'm not sure why. Oh, and I'm going to do a little modification, disabling the second tone pot to just have master volume and master tone. I'll tell you all about it when the deed is done.