'LPB' Squier Cyclone

[guitalias]

Just bought one myself. Still got yours? I'm thinking of making mine into an offset strat.

I do, yeah. It gets less attention than my Jagmaster, but whenever I pull it out I remember why I like it.

If I were going the offset strat route, I'd probably just get one of the newer copies of the Cyclone II, which already is that. The only thing you'd need to do is swap better pickups in, since it's already set up to use strat pickups as opposed to the Jag pickups the originals used.

Or you might want to see if a pickguard from one of those will fit the one you have now, which would make the swap super easy with the swimming pool route.

I'm having a bit of trouble with my pickups. Measured them today, single coil neck is 5.01k, humbucker bridge is 15.82k. Doesn't seem right.
Could you please measure the resistance of your pickups for me, thanks?

[tammyw]

I have one of these. I think that's in the right ballpark for the stock pickups.

[guitalias]

I have one of these. I think that's in the right ballpark for the stock pickups.

Do you find the bridge humbucker much, much louder than single neck? What height do you have pickups? Thanks

[tammyw]

Yeah, there's a pretty big difference between them, I guess it depends how you want to use them. I never really set it up or play it, I just got it for a project I haven't started yet.

[solfege]

Just bought one myself. Still got yours? I'm thinking of making mine into an offset strat.

I do, yeah. It gets less attention than my Jagmaster, but whenever I pull it out I remember why I like it.

If I were going the offset strat route, I'd probably just get one of the newer copies of the Cyclone II, which already is that. The only thing you'd need to do is swap better pickups in, since it's already set up to use strat pickups as opposed to the Jag pickups the originals used.

Or you might want to see if a pickguard from one of those will fit the one you have now, which would make the swap super easy with the swimming pool route.

I'm having a bit of trouble with my pickups. Measured them today, single coil neck is 5.01k, humbucker bridge is 15.82k. Doesn't seem right.
Could you please measure the resistance of your pickups for me, thanks?

I replaced the stock pickups almost immediately. Part of why is that imbalance, though some of that is just that humbuckers and single coils typically have very different outputs measured in this way. Balancing a bridge humbucker with middle / neck single coils is always a bit of a challenge. The Lollars I have in there are actually what Lollar reccomends as a HS set (low wind imperial bridge and blonde strat neck). I can get them to balance pretty nicely by ear. But iirc the original fender ones used pickups that were pretty hot but also pretty unbalanced. Part of how they solved this was the wiring of the switch, which included a resistor on the neck to bring it part of the way down toward the usual 250 that strat single coils see for volume and tone pots, but not all the way (which boosts the perceived level of that pickup relative to the hubucker, which is going straight into the 500 pots). That was a 270 rater than the more typical 470 resister (the latter would in fact cut the 500 pot to 250, the former cuts it about half that distance). The Squier stock omits that resister completely, which, if anything, will help make the strat pickup even louder, but also brighter.

In any event, the stock pickups on these are trash and need replacing. You could easily ask someone like Q pickups or another winder to do a set that would balance well with the wiring you're planning on using, and ask for an uncovered HB with F-spacing while you're at it, so you can use the stock pickguard without modifications. Q would do something like that for I'm sure a very reasonable cost. I have a set of his in my Jagmaster and they're lovely.

[solfege]

Aesthetic update (mostly): I Mustanged the Cyclone!

Which is to say I went back to a Mother of Toilet Seat pickguard -- and got to exercise my new Bosch trim router and learn to make basic templates -- but also switched the white cover on the neck pickup to black.



I'm way happier with this than I was with the red tort, which just never felt good to me with the blue.



While I was in there, I also reflowed a few solder joints and added heat shrink, and I used a couple of big washers I had lying around as spacers below the switch so that it now sits properly flush with the pickguard. I also discovered that some of the nuts holding the tuners in place were a bit loose, which seems to have cured some of the tuning instability that was keeping me from playing this as much as I might. Might not be replacing those tuners after all. Overall, it's playing really well, but the bridge (even with the GFS block) is still trash -- especially the saddles which seem to have stripped in a couple places so the height adjustment screws do nothing. So the next thing this guy is getting is likely going to be an MIM standard strat bridge, which should fix all that. Further updates soon.