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@@ElIsraelJijijiji HSS

@@smithctheo. Used the original pickguard as a template, painters tape on the replacement and traced out the cut lines on the tape. Combination of jewelers saw and Dremel.

@@smithctheo. BTW this one ended up being a low fret, not high frets. Replaced it, fixed the weird frustrating buzz and fret slap. Never moved the bridge tho I should. A pretty severe UPS adjustment centered the strings well enough but leaves too big a gap on the long side of the neck pocket.

Lowest priced HSS rosewood fingerboard is the shell pink, $220. Strong feelings on either side over pink guitars, I'm a big fan.

@@oldasrocks9121 I would like that they sell the Olympic white with the rosewood fingerboard

@@ElIsraelJijijiji That's a classic one, a SSS JS300 like that

62 years old here, don't need the lesson or the scolding. AND I said exactly the same thing in my FIRST SPOKEN SENTENCE. You want to contribute something useful please do otherwise go parent your own kids.

@@LaserusBlue ears maybe?? If you delete the single tone and pull the T&B or TMB out there's a lot of noise to chase down. Lead dress and grounding issues. There's a lot of flying components below the controls in stock form as well and unshielded grid leads. Needs more than simply recapping the power supply, could even use a new turret board or vox style terminal strip board and revised layout. VHS dedicated way too much space to PSU, tone control and preamp stages need more sensible layout. Feedback gets it even closer to recognizable blackface clean headroom sounds. It doesn't sound that different from the original except for the gain boost deleting the single tone control, same good VHS tones. Speaker swaps always change the sound of any amp, good old tubes too. Those two would get a person 65-75% of the way there in stock form with fiddling with the circuit.

Search the tube for John Nathan Cordy We need to talk about Jet guitars. He plays a shell pink $200 JT300. And if anybody gets crunchy about top loading Teles kindly remind them all of Led Zeppelin I was recorded with a top loader.

@@oldasrocks9121 - will do.

@@Tsilsby Dog's breakfast we'd have called it where I grew up. Get a Jet! The fanboys are quite a crew, really don't know what to say about them. A bunch of dogs at breakfast I guess...

@@user-mf4wg5ls9b No, they're junk. Junk bodies with plastic photo wood grain wraps, iirc mine was 6 pieces of wood. All the hardware but the bridge plate is junk, pickups are junk, fingerboard is composite "wood". I'd buy a random ebay Chenders first. Stack your cash snd get a Squier CV.

@@user-mf4wg5ls9b Harley Benson headstock shape, and their stupid name/logo.

@@Shamacanada If Nick Valensi won a bar fight with Brad Paisley... Great fun for a $110 guitar from the Walmart toy section, worth the effort

I put P94's in, very jangly. I got Guitar Madness A5 P94's, swapped the brass backplates for nickel steel and changed the neck magnets to A4. There's a short on my channel for the look. Knocked the shine off the body, painted the pickguard black, $45 Chinese eBone neck, dual concentric pots for VTVT. Had to move the output jack for the pots.

@@JaxHiddenTraxTotally worth the $110 delivered from Walmart if only for the body. I'd leave the bridge, upgrade the saddles to chromed brass keyholes, Musiclilys are quite decent, gotohs are spendy. You could get a Deluxe pickguard that has the neck humbucker and the skirted cut out for the ashtray bridge and see where it lands. There's one Joe Barden ashtray bridge that has the string through holes and the screw holes flipped like a modern flat plate bridge but it's a pretty expensive gamble. A flat plate 6 saddle might also fit but again measure twice and compare to the technical drawing of the bridge. Usually the 6 saddle 1/2 bridges have their own string/screw hole patterns. P94's are great. Bootstrap's HB90's are basically overwound strat pickups, Ryan might be selling black ones again. The ones with steel covers are solid nickel plated, steel backplates, no pole piece holes, so they look like giant Firebird pickups. I love the way they sound. The ceramic humbuckers in this are actually nice for sub-budget pickups. I pulled the brass covers, mine were double white bobbins X2. You could swap the backplates but iirc they weren't at all muddy with the covers off. They are hot!! Bridge was 18K with the thick ceramic magnet. They might be 2 wire, I don't recall. They were really civilized rolled back to 3 or 4 but they will strip car paint cranked! The neck is skinny and the frets are quite small. Harley Benton headstock shape. The truss rod nut on mine was off center, needed the tapered Allen key to bite the socket. Plastic nut. Very glossy. The body is really nice. Only 1/2 hollow, the lower side is solid. Pickguard is slightly different than standard replacements, I spray painted mine satin black, scraped back the bevel. Personally I'd still rather P94s in an ES335 knock-off. This one doesn't have enough vibe to go for Shawbuckers or Fender Wide Range but the WRs'd fit in the routing. Mad Love in Australia sells the best affordable original size wide range humbuckers that I've found. The funky Tele to get might be the white Troublemaker knock-off at Firefly. Or their Mad Cat if you want single coils. The Mad Cat gets consistent rave reviews

8ish, maybe a touch less. My Squier 40th Vintage is the tubby: 9 pounds 3 ounces. Nyato.

@@oldasrocks9121 ouch, both are heavy.

@@bluwng Used to an ash PBass keeping me stuck to the ground. The Squier is extreme, it's on deck to get the fender mid boost PCB and 9v battery, will do a pickup swimming pool too at the same time

Class AB I'd bias them around 13, maybe 14 watts. I scored a pair of 90s Sovtek 6L6WXT, true 6l6GC's, very brawny. These ones tho, wouldn't do more than 300v on the plates

Guitarelectronics dot com is the classic old school resource, also check out the Six String Supplies channel, he's got many videos for many wiring schemes for many guitars and provides links to printable diagrams. And a good soldering station! Some like Weller, I prefer Hakko.

Rust-Oleum "Farm House Black". Scraped back the bevel with a box knife blade.

Which pickups did you get? Mine were sold together, the Epiphone Alnico Classic Pros and harness, from the fellow that pulled everything out of his Traditional Pro IV. Magnet swap to sandcast alnico 2s. See the mods video, link in comments. Had to replace one volume pot, luckily they're available. The phase reverse pot is not. The DeLisle Varitone switch is not bad. Depending on the amp it's handy. The guitar body lacks resonance (I don't think the center block is maple, wrong grain.) It can be shrill rather than bright, candidate for flat wounds perhaps Needs an amp with solid lows and low mids, the Pinnacle bridge helped but not quite enough. The DeLisle is noisy, switch body needs grounded and the output wire needs replaced with shielded wire. I would pick the Kingtone Duet on a do-over, kind of wish I had 1st time around.

Also, the FF pots are pretty good. The jack and the pickup switch are cheap, under duress I'd change the jack and perhaps wait for the switch to break. I think the pickups are decent. Not great but okay. At least they need a nickel steel backing plate which will change their character, and I'd pull the brass covers also. It depends what finish you want and if you're keeping the gold hardware. The Gibson Lucille has 490T/490R pickups which are pretty strident. The FF ones are a bit mushy because of the brass backplates and covers.

Xotic Raw Vintage springs. The block is the MusicLily full steel block for the Wilkinson M Series bridges, check Amazon

Swapped the bass string saddles with the high string saddles. Then replaced it.

It's a one or the other thing in this PSU. The power supply splits into 2 parallel feeds after the standby switch at the junction of R42 and R43, the power tube B+ and screen B+ is on the power scaling circuit starting at R43, the 12Ax7s are fed from R42 with no power scaling. I think Robinette's rationale (if he had one) was to smooth the power tube ripple to keep the 60hz hum down. A 2nd choke for the preamp would be slightly ridiculous overkill, the DC heaters seems like it's supposed to address preamp noise. Most of the noise in mine comes from the Ultra input triode, the new socket and new metal film grid stoppers is a start, if I can get that down to normal gain noise I'll be happy. The rest of the noise is power tube noise when the raw switch is on, some of that can be attributed to creeping heater/cathode leakage in the vintage tubes I'm running but most of it is weird lead dress, long lead runs, the somewhat chaotic grounding scheme (definitely a scheming scheme...), Fred Flintstone solder joints and the crappy original power tube socket. The blackface tone stack hides a lot of inherent signal circuit noise. Got all the formerly flying leads down on the chassis, replaced the super short ones. Many of the board leads aren't inserted into the eyelets, they're just laid on top and buried in those huge mounds of solder, I've fixed many but not all. Redoing the grid leaks and bias resistor grounds will need a couple of tag strips so I can ground them to the appropriate B+ cap ground but I want to do things one step at a time and A/B the noise floor at each step. Not convinced the power transformer would survive running big bottles all the time. The best big bottle approach would be to replace the transformer, get about 50 or 100 more raw volts at the secondaries, double the current capacity, dial in on tube manual specs for one power tube, just choose your sonic flavor and be happy with that. Trying to run correctly biased 6L6GCs or KT66s as is a bit of a fool's errand at 326v plate B+.

Nah, I think it's just weird Chinese guitar factory/counterfeiting logic that doesn't translate to the real world.

@@oldasrocks9121 But how hard would it be to make their guitars to Fender specs? They're either really stupid or they worry about Fender suing them because it would make their guitars so much more popular!

I've since sanded the body down. Not bad, just 2 pieces, sealed it with Garnett shellac, might do a one color burst or might just hit it with lacquer and be done for now. Measured this neck heel compared to all the other bolt on FF necks here and it's a full 2mm thinner which explains the Fred Flintstone gouge in the neck pocket to accommodate the truss adjust wheel. Neck pocket is the same depth as the other 2 FF Teles here. I honestly believe the relic Teles were built to sell off blemished bodies and the mismade neck. The first two numbers of your serial number indicate what factory it was made at within the JSN Firefly group. This one is made at factory 80, which is a little surprising to me because my 338 are made at factory 80 and are pretty good. I'm sure it's a different line with different people working on Telecasters. My other normal slightly janky Telecaster was also from factory 80. My shell pink Strat from two or three batches ago is from factory 06. Check and see if your relic Strat is from factory 06. I would have to guess it is, And it was built by a specific assembly line in that factory by workers who build strats all day everyday. Mine is coming around. I swapped necks with my pink HH Tele, that one can be a "shredder" if it wants. This one now has a refinished maple fingerboard FF neck, original FF radius and profile. I still want a double cut, the new burst one appears to have a much smaller revised neck heel. And I still haven't bought a Lester. The CalTrans safety green one sold out before I could pull the trigger. 😢

@@oldasrocks9121 You're pretty smart, my good relic'd Strat is an 06! I bought an LP copy and it was fine but nothing great and I sold it. I also have a SG copy that is really good and it's an 03. I bought an Explorer copy that was okay but I didn't like the body style at all and sold it. The only other FF I bought was an LP Jr double cut and it was terrible! The neck didn't fit the pocket in depth correctly and you couldn't adjust the saddles to give you comfortable action! I sent it and the Tele, the last two FF guitars I bought back for a refund. TBH, the Monoprice. IYV, and LyxPro guitars I bought on Amazon were very consistent and as good as Firefly guitars (except for the relic'd Strat), IMO. I'm sticking with them in the future as far as cheap guitars. But they only have a few models. And that is where FF goes wrong, IMO, in trying to put too many guitar models out there too quickly.

An HH Tele with 2 point trem, and HSS Strat and 2 FF338s. All the "custom Alnico 5" humbuckers" in those guitars Guitar Gardens descriptions are the same: bobbins made for ceramic magnets with the integral spacer posts, slug lengths for the thicker ceramic magnet, shimmed A5 magnet, steel pole screw keeper floating around. The keeper needs to be trapped between the bobbin bottom and the back plate so it won't vibrate against either. I would bet a paycheck the Les Paul & et al pickups are exactly the same.

@@oldasrocks9121 so the pickups have no redeeming quality/ can’t be saved since you said you can’t wax pot the issue?

@@smooothybuns Maybe. Don't look past how randomly they are put together tho. So, hope against hope... (Bookmark this first: Artec Giovanni GVH-1 pickups are pretty amazing, pound for pound. OnlyPedals might still have some on Reverb. Bootstrap Pickups handwinds humbuckers for around $150 I think, I have his Tele single coils in a couple guitars and his P94 types, if his humbuckers are as good they're the best handwound bargain going. Tone Hatch too but he might wing bridges only, check. Okay then...) I think the easiest rehab thing would be to swap in the thicker ceramic magnets and the correct steel keeper, screw the backplate back on, leave the covers off. That'll probably get you around 18K out of a typical FF bridge. That's just inside Joan Jett territory. I’ve never bought ceramics, I'm pretty sure Philadelphia Luthiers' Supply doesn't have them, maybe Mojotone? I tried the alnico way on one set, cut those integral posts off the bobbin bottoms, filed the bobbin flat, ditched the shim on the magnet, swapped in correct length slugs, good pole screws, nickel steel back plate, maple spacers, known A5 magnets. Not so bad, but they didn't end up happy accidents. Results didn't equal effort and $ spent. Plain, more than a little smeary. Not lively, flat dynamics. Hamfisted with gain. Swapped in A3 magnets, same story. Quit on it. I say ditch them from the go, put efforts and monies into pickups you want to try or know you like or have heard and liked. Upgrade instead of sidegrade. Skip Guitar Madness and GFS and all that stuff, cheap Amazon pickups RUclips chuckleheads say are amazing, blah blah blah. I put a set of post 2013 Epiphone Probuckers 1&2s in the rainbow FF338, $65. More scarce than 2&3s. They're really great, built well. US seller, pulled them out of his new guitar. I skipped the Asian sellers with dozens of sets listed. Put A2 magnets in recent Epi Alnico Classic Pros that came with a push-pull harness, seller pulled them out of his Trad Pro IV Les Paul, put it all in the Lucille ff338. So. Much. Better. Good start.

This one offered again just this week. For the money FF has better choices this month, the semi hollow with the Bigsby copy and Filtertrons is beguiling. Philadelphia Luthier Supply sells the correct magnets, pole screws and base plates to convert the knockoffs to truer Filtertrons. The B3 is not hard to install on a Tele, even using a stock ashtray bridge. You need to notch the back edge for the strings to clear, easy with a Dremel and a cut off wheel, burnish your sharp edges. The new ash body burst Tele is good looking, the Troublemaker HH copy is also back. Good choices this month. I need a Lester or maybe the double cut, skipping Teles this round.

I'd say medium jumbo, maybe 6100?

Doesn't bug me much tho I agree with you. Pulled all the Lucille gold (resell as a set) everything is nickel now, zebra Epiphone Alnico Classic Pros w/A2 magnets swapped in, the Epi harness with coil splits and phase reverse push pulls, lightweight stopbar and locking studs, Pinnacle CNC'd brass/brass/bell brass/bell brass Nashville bridge, locking Grover type tuners from the other 338 I'm redoing. Need a good Varitone, likely the De Lisle, maybe the Kingtone Duet, maybe a surplus Epi Lucille stereo PCB. Likely De Lisle. Solid instrument now but not as resonant as my f-hole 338, center block is too soft for even soft maple (the species.) Guessing basswood/linden which would be disappointing. Already have too many budget basswood guitars and basses, the harmonics are all over the place, poplar is better.

Finished the upgrades, just posted the video

Huh??? Every Lucille, genuine or copy, has a controls cover, there are no f-holes.

@@oldasrocks9121 I didn't know that! Never saw the back of 1!

@@DMSProduktions Yes, on a typical 335 the lower f-hole is the access to the wiring harness, in some guitars the center block allows access at the bridge pickup. As the Lucille copies have no f-holes they need back control covers similar to LPs and SGs. Epiphones and Gibsons have a better fit, the cover is flush and has it's own designed shape. This FF cover is likely an SG cover w/a bevelled edge rigged to fit. It happens to reveal a junk wood center block in this one with unpeeled bark, voids and so forth, the defects are in the bridge pickup route as well. Doubt it's maple, likely basswood or some Asian species. This guitar isn't as resonant or acoustically loud as my other 338. Wouldn't recommend it, stick to the f-holes versions.

@@oldasrocks9121 Makes sense!

Fingers crossed the diy refin goes well

Indeed

🤣🤣ALSO!! LETS HELP LOUIS FIGURE OUT SOMETHING USEFUL TO DO WITH HIS TIME BESIDES LAUGH-CRYING AT SANDING A GUITAR!! 🤣🤣 MAYBE A PINATA WOULD KEEP HIM OCCUPIED FOR A LITTLE WHILE!! 🤣🤣

Construction. The Epiphone Probuckers and Alnico Classic Pros post 2013 are built as premium production pickups, maple spacers, high carbon stud and screw poles, nickel silver backplates and covers. Potted but not super-vacuum potted like the Epi "wax-buckers" of the past. I suspect they're wound with poly insulated magnet wire which separates them from US Gibson Burstbuckers and 57 Classics which are wound with plain enamel wire. Sound differences between enamel, poly and Formvar wire are real, not cork-sniffer fictions. I'll make a Firefly humbucker autopsy video this week and compare to a good pickup. All the FF pickups I've pulled, these, bridge pup from a Strat and a set from an HH Tele are all the same pickups. Wax potting these will never fix the microphonics. The magnet, steel keeper, bobbins, spacers and backplate all need to fit together tightly, air gaps in these parts cause microphonics, not just the gap between the cover and the bobbin tops. The FF ones are junk, keep them for parts. They can't cost FF $5 a set. I'll get a FF LP next month to check out and then I'm done, back to Epiphones and Squiers. The hype doesn't add up and I don't get a sense FF has any sort of feeling for their customers one way or another, it's just old school anon Chibson factory stuff that happens to have a brand name.

Thanks, can't wait. For me, Firefly + GM pickups + setup time = guitars that look and play great, with the pickup color/types I want, and all for a fraction of the cost of the name brands. Also, an affordable way to try new body styles and have multiples with different pickup types We'll see if they pass the test of time.

​@@maorienteg Stick to the steel backplates GMs, they'll be a notch or so above the brass plate ones. Steel plates raise inductance and so signal strength and increase the magnetic field size. I grind a little swipe of plating off any cover to see if it's brass, if it is off the cover comes. Brass will both darken your tone but also squelch dynamics, note definition, string separation and so on. A good pickup will respond to changes on amp gain as well as guitar volume control in a tonal and dynamic way, a so-so pickup will just get louder or quieter.

​​@@maorientegSanded a patch of the green off, there is a healthy coat of sanding sealer under the color. By hand, 100 grit, made a small block out of poly packing foam, 2" x 3", no power sander, definitely no heat gun!! Scraped back paint in the pickup route to investigate, the 3 maple layers of the lam top are very thin, the 2 (poplar?) layers between them are far thicker. When sanding you can tell when you've cut through the clear: the color layer brightens a bit. The color comes off quicker than the poly, slow down when you hit the color coat, slight traces left should come off with the next grit, you could jump right to 320. Light touch, go slow, save the elbow grease. If you cut through the sanding sealer you can always apply a fresh couple coats, I'd suggest it even if you don't get down to wood. Tint your poly clear. I'm leaving the dark back and sides, will tint clear with powdered analine dyes in mineral spirits for a ruddy/dirty amber, no burst, just a basic Lazarus top. May go easy on myself and do hand rubbed poly. Takes more coats than spraying but is way more forgiving. Satin, then buff with the $10 Amazon hand drill buffing pad kit and Resto furniture polish. Will probably wet sand the gloss off the back and sides with 1500 grit and buff it all at once to a softer sheen.

Thank you! and sounds like a good plan. I'd be doing a hand poly too, any tips afterwards would be appreciated. I was originally thinking of a wine red top myself, but after seeing the back and sides not sure now. Looking forward to seeing your ruddy amber

You've misunderstood sir, $138, and no remorse.

Agreed. It got accidentally named yesterday: Skittles.

I know what it sounds like brother.

WD has some good swirly tortie like guards, they'll make them in translucent versions as well as multi-ply. I believe Lavaguards make spendy celluloid ones, there's a place in the UK too, doctor/dentist money tho

Tee'd a green one up, dark tortie won. Maple finger board and a more subdued shade of shell pink I'd say mint green would edge out the win but the rosewood on this one is super super dark, even red tortie looked a bit odd. Single ply black was a maybe.

The pickups are already 490R/498T-ish, pulling the covers was the right thing. Rehabbing them totally with steel baseplates and long screw poles might really bring them around. I've got 2 sets of Artecs in mind, the Hot Platinums or the GVH-1 set, leaning towards the GVHs, already know them, they are tres sweet, and I want to try them with sandcast A5's. The Hot Platinums and the LPA210 set are nominally like the Duncan JB/Jazz & 490R/498T thing but a 335 isn't the best guitar to debut pickups. (LPA210s have plated brass covers which darkens them up a touch, like the Duncans are darkish.) I've got a few cheapo brass backplate "hot peppers" sets from various cheapos, I could make a black&white double screw pole set that has slightly mismatched bobbins that could be just the ticket for a rowdy Lester...) All due props and respect to you and Al DM but this machine would look spectacular with a satin olive drab top. Gold not withstanding! If I go gold I should paint a pair of shoes to match...

Solid plan: Alnico 2 magnets swapped in to Epi Alnico Classic Pros with the 3 push pull quick connect harness and a couple sets of Probucker 2&3s to experimentate.

Happy Xmas. "Flawless" seems like pushing it, Custom Shops are flawless out of the box. I do admire the optimism tho.

Yeah I know, it's a replacement pickguard, hole didn't line up.

@oldasrocks9121 I often have most of the holes on replacement pickguards not line up so I fill the old ones and drill new

@@2bikemikesguitartopics145 This was the only one, just haven't done it yet. Might not, it's like a birthmark.

Hey old as rocks man I'm old as dirt been playing for over 50 years and I'm digging how I can get a really nice guitar that comes standard with stainless steel frets like the Censtar Strat Style guitar I just bought. But I want to get a Firefly also, I wanna compare it to my Censtar which ran me right under $200 including tax. I have one picked out that is HSS loaded and the color on the Ash body is black with yellow wood grain which looks really good, it's only $169 plus tax. But anyway I wanted let you know that with all do respect please consider when your doing a review like this to back off the camera alittle so we can get a full shot of your axe , I mean I was waiting to see the whole thing but it never happened. So carry on and take it easy on the close ups.....

I'll measure with a long straight edge under string tension and feeler gauges. The fret rocker doesn't show any high frets past the 12th. I can finesse the difference between neck relief and saddle height, decrease relief and raise saddles. As is with relief at .012" I can raise string height on low E and A to 5/64+ and squelch the buzz but I count that a kludge not a solution, a good neck can go down to 3/64ths, sometimes lower. I may open the long vertical side of the neck pocket enough to correct string alignment rather than reset the bridge, and shim the short side so it's stable against shifting laterally. The bridge would need to move about 3/32", drill and fill the body. The solution of course is for Firefly to set bridges precisely like a bona fide guitar builder instead of squinting with one eye closed and drilling holes that aren't even centered in the bridge holes with hand drills. They should revise their method for drilling neck joint screws as well, both the bridge and the neck mounting screws are dirt floor jungle factory crap. Waiting for the Bootstrap pickups to arrive before I dive back in, bridge gets the overwound Pretzel to keep up with the 9K staple P90.