Daytona Pickguard removal: Requires neck bolt loosening?

[topekatj]

Hi all:

I'm thinking I'd like to tie my bridge pickup to a tone pot. Since the neck end of the pickguard is under the fingerboard extension, must I remove the neck or at least loosen the neck bolts to lift the pickguard? Lotsa work to solder in a 1 inch piece of wire....

Has anyone else perfomed this mod to their stock Daytona? Maybe if I hear rave reports I'll make the move.

Thanks

[cmatthes]

Yes - you'll need to slacken the strings, loosen the bolts and the pickguard will slide out.

[topekatj]

Yes - you'll need to slacken the strings, loosen the bolts and the pickguard will slide out.

Thanks for the quick reply. Are we talking 1/2 inch or more of loosening on all four bolts? The guitar is setup/playing great. I don't want to futz up the intonation. Oh well, more work for "my luthier" I guess....

[cmatthes]

Ha ha!!

I just loosen it a bit - just enough to slip the guard out of there and back. Like yours, the last time I changed the guard, it had been just perfectly dialed in beforehand. I actually counted and wrote down the number of screw turns on each neck bolt to get it back as close to it was.

[topekatj]

Thanks CM! So just a pickguard change for yours and no bridge pickup tone control?

[cmatthes]

Pickup swap.

[atquinn]

I've actually removed pickguards from a couple of Daytona's without loosening the neck bolts, but it requires a bit of fiddling with the pickup neck and middle bridge pickups heights. At any rate, whatever you have to do to get the tone pot on the bridge pickup, do it!

-

Austin

[Ting Ho Dung]

Just to add to the above posts, everything was so tight on my Daytona I had to loosen the neck bolts a bit to get the pg out. I had EMGs in mine so had to do it somewhat frequently. Remove all the pg screws and see if you can wriggle the bridge end up to gain leverage to pull toward the bridge. If it comes out great. If not, loosen the neck bolts a bit. But, I eventually took my neck off and cleaned up the drill holes so the neck wouldn't have any "air" between it and the body. If you take off your neck you will see that they didn't countersink any of the holes. Countersinking is normally done in exterior applications but in this case it would prevent the screws from digging up the edges and sandwiching them between the neck heel and the neck pocket. But, that's just me having nothing else to do and think about.