Wow.

[AprioriMark]

I have the SG Jr in trans black, and I bought it used (brand new condition; not a scratch) for 40 bucks to resell to a student who wanted one.  I couldn't give it up, because the thing played sooooo well.  Easily one of the best production necks I've ever felt.  I did take it apart, because I'm me, and the neck pocket is significantly different from a W one.  It will fit in, but it's short, and (this is from memory, so don't quote me in court), it would have required moving the bridge with 25.5", 24.75" and 24" necks.  I wasn't looking to change the neck anyway, so I installed some Grover tuners, swapped in a Gibson Dirty Fingers pickup from an '80 LP and added a treble bleed.  The tone knob was already surprisingly useful. 

This guitar is my cheap-o guilty pleasure.  Between this and a lot of the Squier offerings lately, I laugh at cork-sniffers.

-Mark

 

[reluctant-builder]

I bought two, online, since I've no way to carry two guitars home on the subway ... and even if I did, I wouldn't want to try. They arrived yesterday.

Initially, I couldn't decide which was the better one. One of them was perfectly intoned, but had horrible, sky-high action ... the other one was poorly intoned with high action.

I lowered the action of the one with bad intonation, removed the scale-lengthening adjustment screws from the tailpiece and now its action is low, it intones and there's no buzz.

Interestingly, this one had a shim in the neck pocket ... as well as some finish build-up. I removed the finish build-up and, initially, took out the shim, but that flattened the neck angle too much and resulted in buzz. So, I replaced the shim and got it to the aforesaid good conditions.

Sorry, Altar, but I forgot to measure it before I put the neck back on.

The other one, I'm assuming it doesn't have a shim; the neck angle is pretty flat and, I figure, that's why I can't lower its action as much. However, I've tuned it to open D and broken out my slide, and am playing it flat on my lap to my continual enjoyment. This may just have to be my slide guitar.

The finish on the high-action version is inconsistent and there was a blemish in the upper cutaway (well, for me, it's the upper, for you righties it'd be the lower), that when I ran my thumb gently over it, the finish came completely away. It's not huge, but it's annoying. And another reason I'll be keeping this one for myself and giving the more pristine to my niece.

On the bright side ... they both seem to have mahogany necks AND bodies ... where the specs said "basswood" ... I'm no wood-grain specialist, but I've got three mahogany body guitars and the grain on the SG looks the same. I got the TV Yellow versions and I've read online that someone else who bought the TV Yellow got a mahogany body, whereas those who bought the Cherry got basswood.

The pickups are very hot. Ice-pick treble, but muddy, muddy bass. They've got 'ceramic 8' magnets, according to Epiphone. The tone knob is pretty useless, rolling off the highs utterly ruins the bass and saps the volume from the treble strings. Rolling down the volume with the tone dimed is a better tone-management option.

On the one I'm keeping, I'll probably take the bridge pickup that I took out of my Hagstrom Standard Swede (I'm putting in P-90s, there, if the toggle switch I need ever arrives), and put it in the SG. It's got Alnico V magnets and it's really quite a great pup. I just wanted that P-90 sound in my Hag ... and I've got a mod compulsion.

 

[Corey P.]

... and I've got a mod compulsion.

I hear that.

 

[reluctant-builder]

Swapped out the pickup.

The stock one was 17.27 KOhms! I've never seen a pickup with that much resistance before ...

 

[Cagey]

Maybe it was wound with thinner gauge wire.

The same number of winds using different gauges of wire will return different resistance values. Then, that's only one of a number of characteristics of a pickup that matter. The number by itself means little. People keep reporting is as if it matters, but that's largely because they don't have any other measuring devices other than an ohmmeter to define the other variables.

When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Many manufacturers now report coil resistance values as a result of this pointless "need to know", even though they don't mean much. People expect to see them and think they mean something. But, the most you can know by that value if you're comparing two pickups is if you know they're both wound with the same wire. Then, the higher the resistance value, the greater the number of winds on the coil, which might mean it's a hotter pickup. Of course, that depends on how tightly it's wound, whether you use ferrous or magnetic pole pieces, the shape of the pieces, what kind of magnets are involved, the shape and strength of the magnets, how tall/short they are, how loose/tight the windings are, whether they're symetrically or scatter wound, on and on and on.