PRS style guitar Mod Your HH Guitars

PRS style guitar Mod Your HH Guitars is an inexpensive way to bring you Pro results for a fraction of the cost of a high end PRS style guitar.
This video shows you several options that can help you make your inexpensive guitar play like a high end custom shop guitar. Although this is video is using an IYV guitar, these mods can work on almost any HH style guitar.

With a few simple tools, a little learning and a bit of work you can have the guitar you've always dreamed of playing!

Some examples would be:
• Change out factory 500k pots for 2 CTS 500k push/pull pots to split the pickups together and separately
• Add your own orange drop .033 to put the the tonal range in-between the 500k and 250k resistance ranges (a sort of happy medium)
• Shield all the cavities with conductive copper tape

Here are my notes from modding this guitar, I hope they help.
Guitar details:
Price $175
Weight it 7lbs 12 oz
Measurements:
Fretboard:
width at the nut 42.6"
Width at the 12th fret 53.7"
Width at the 24th fret?
Radius 14
24 frets
Entire height 38 1/4"
Width at bridge 12 7/8"
Finish is glossy black to grey burst
1 volume, 1 tone & 3 way switch

Setup details:
✓ Checked neck it's flat
✓ Action perfect for me
✓ No high or low frets
✓ Intonation perfect
✓ No brand tuners hold tune great
✓ Installed & lubed a new Metallor bone nut and confirmed that at least this IYV model does come with a bone nut.
✓ Rounded fretboard edges and sanded very slight amount of fretsprout
✓ Polished frets (500 & 1200 grit) then dremel buffed out to a high shine.
✓ Conditioned fretboard (Dunlop 65 lemon oil for fretboards)
✓ Added two 500k CTS push/pull pots (Vol splits neck pu & tone splits bridge) independently or use 3 way switch to combine any combination)
✓ installed a 1k resistor on vol pot (for neck pu split) and a 2k resistor on tone pot (for bridge pu split) to help with volume drop associated with humbuckers being split.
Neck pickup Kohms: 9.45k
Bridge pickup Kohms: 15.58k
✓ Shielded pu & electronics cavities with conductive copper tape) with continuous ground back to pots
✓ Installed a new .033ul capacitor to brighten up the humbuckers and still work with the split pickups.
✓ Created a comprehensive schematic of wiring to share.
✓ Adjusted pickup heights to balance out volume between pickups
✓ Tightened all screws and nuts
✓ Installed Stringjoy 9-42 strings
✓ buffed out a small surface scuff (on bottom) and a small left over glue spot (on neck joint)
✓ After all setup & mods
Buff out entire guitar with Nufinish wax

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Links & notes in the PRS guitar mods:

Coil split using a resistor
   • Secret PRS Coil-Split Mod | Guitar Te...  
Note: The higher the value, the less coil cancellation.

check the 2 wires and find the 2 that give a kilo-ohms resistance, then you know which ones are the coil wires
Note: You should only get a reading between the 2 coils
Testing polarity:
✓ 1. Put the meter in milli-volts
✓ 2. Hook up jumpers to the two coil wires
✓ 3. Take a piece of steel and move it up and down over the 2 coils and if you get a large variation in the reading #s then you've found the north or south coil. Make note of it
✓ 4. Take a magnetic metal and put it over the charged coil. (Say positive black & negative white) if when you put it over the coil you get positive numbers when initially placed on the coil and negative when you take it away then your polarity is correct. If you get negative numbers then your polarity is reversed.
✓ 5. Put a meter ohms to the push/pull pot and verify switching
7. Find which coil on both humbuckers is north side and which is the south side
8. Solder the screw side (N or S) to the switch and solder the slug side to the push/pull. This will make the screw side hot and the slug side (split) the resisted ground side. Therefore giving the widest distance between the pickups when they are split.
9. Verify that the 2 outside single coils are on the push/pulls

✓ C. Drill holes out to 3/8" to fit push/pull pots and measure pots to order knobs
✓ Note: check & use values of the push/pull pots that are less than 500k verses more.
✓ D. Shielded cavities
✓ E. Figure out 2nd set of wires are pos/neg or north and south
   • How to figure out the wire color code...  
F. Make a cardboard template of the holes configuration to wire up pots and switch
G. Rewire new pots & caps with push pull pots using new schematic
H. Reinstall in guitar

Installed 2 push pull pots
Volume will split humbuckers
push/pull tone will add a .033 cap for both single and humbuckers
Be sure that split shafts have a tight fit for knobs
wax and polish guitar
Install Stringjoy 9-42
Neck relief?
Set up optimal string height
Set/check intonation
Intro to setup/mod video


Here is the preview on this IYV PRS style guitar
PRS Style guitar for $180 - Can't Be - Unbox & complete review IYV IP-350 TBK PRS
   • PRS Style guitar for $180 - Can't Be ...  

Here's my email if you have any questions
[email protected]