Hi!
So yesterday was the day for changing pickups in my Shawn Lane model. I came across a couple of difficulties and thought I'd share it here, maybe it'll help someone else planning to do the same.
I swapped both humbuckers, not the middle single coil. The Air Classics are a bit weak for my taste so I ordered Bareknuckles, Alnico Nailbomb in the bridge and Cold Sweat in the neck.
First of all, a problem I was aware of is the fact that the humbuckers has 2 screws for adjusting height on the treble side. Luckily Vigier did this by an extra small metal plate which has 3 threaded holes. Middle for attaching the plate to the pickup and 2 on the sides for the height adjust screws. So that plate can be used for the new pickups aswell. The leg on normal pickups doesn't have more than 1 hole each side so I had to drill 2 extra holes in the pickups legs. This was easy since baseplate material is pretty soft, but you need to be careful so you don't get to close to the middle hole. I did have to file a bit to get it wide enough. A weird thing was that the screws used before didn't easily thread into the bareknuckle hole, and i didn't wanna force them in. No problem I thought, Bareknuckle sent plenty of screws with the pickups. However they were longer than Vigier screws and wouldn't fit into the cavity without touching the bottom. Neither did other screws of various brands I had at home so I had to cut the Bareknuckle screws a little bit shorter.
Ok, with that sorted out it was time to put the pickups in. The neck went in but it was really tight to get it into the pickguard. The bridge however didn't fit at all. So I had to take some sandpaper and start working on the pickguard. A boring hour later I managed to take away enough to press the pickup in there, but it was even tighter than the neck. I tell you, I'm so happy i didn't order pickups with covers cause they won't fit without some serious work on the pickup holes. I almost ordered chrome covers but decided not to, very glad for that now! I also noted that the springs for the height adjust screws used by vigier are very sturdy, so if you raise the pickup high you will get some major resistence. My solution was to use the BK springs which are much softer and I even cut them shorter to decrease tension. That worked fine. After that I just soldered the cables and all done.
It wasn't difficult to do these things but I have plenty of tools and stuff in my garage so I'd imagine someone living in a small apartment without a metal saw, drilling machine etc who'd think it's just a matter of unscrew, unsolder and then just screw the new ones in and solder them will be a bit frustrated?
As I said, this was on a Shawn Lane and i have no idea if these issues would appear on other models with pickguards?
Anyway, hope this helps others and don't be discouraged to swap pickups, it's an easy way to alter tone in your guitar and well worth these small fixes i had to do to make it work...
EDIT: Oh, and another thing: The Vigier 2011 Vibrato seems very shallow so depending on the brand of strings you use, the wired part of the string end near the ball might be so long that it reaches over the saddle. I'm in a string testing period right now and the Ernie Ball, and Daddario NYXL was just fine, but I put on a set of Curt Mangan and they were too long. Just take off the ball of your old strings and put them on. It will be enough to make the wired part end before the saddle.
