The main reason he got this guitar back was because he ran out of gigbags, so the guitar was more like some dead weight taking room in a bag he could use for helping one of his cool guitars survive the dry heat of August. Of course I said yes, and he arrived at our place with this beauty :
What we have here ? A pretty dirty Jim Harley strat copy, with old crusty strings, no setup, some grime but nothing really bad, etc. He hasn't played it in years and it shows, but its in better shape than I thought at first.
So, after throwing the old strings in the bin, I went to take it apart. Nothing special going on with the neck, the tuners are rough but in working order, they also left some tan lines on the back of the headstock :
Speaking of tan lines, I removed the pickguards and took out the pickups, and two things I've never seen before : tan lines so marked they look like duo-tone pickups, and strat-style pickups with some sort of weird metal baseplate ?
I also had never seen a switch like this, but I'm not well-versed in strat switch variants :
The pots are standard import mini-pots, I never had any problem with these so they stayed in, after a good glug of contact cleaner, same for the switch.
It looks like I was the first person to remove the knobs, the underside was grimy af and they still had some of the protective plastic that came with the pickguard left around the shafts :
I had nothing against the sound of the stock pickups, but as I wanted to have three pickups there I had a go in my parts box. The problem is, the holes in the pickguard are to narrow for standard strat covers, so I put the pickups in without the covers. I chose 3 pickups with matching resistance to have something somewhat coherent, and I choose ones with magnetic rods for the neck and bridge, and filled the middle position with whatever worked, as I picture it as "less important". I'm not a strat guy, but that's the direction I went in based on "common wisdom" that magnetic rod pickups are better than ones with a magnet underneath.
Something fun : the body is routed throughout, so with the backplate removed you see the underside of the bridge pickups. It's see-through
:
I wonder how it would work with translucent pickguard and backplate, but I'm pretty sure nothing is standard on this guitar, it's something you rarely see nowadays with cheap guitars, you don't get as much copies with nothing matching the specs of standard parts, like these narrow pickup routes, weird hardware, etc.. It also has a sidejack, which I don't think is really simpler to make than a typical strat jack ? Maybe just to avoid using one more metallic part !
Something funny : after looking online for infos about the ok-ness of running strat pickups without covers, someone mentioned on some messageboard that it was how Schecter did it with some of their strats.
After a quick image search, I found some red schecter strats with a sidejack, white pickguard and black pickups ! (I couldn't see if they had covers or not).
So to do some kind of a nod to this (80s hot rodded guitar maybe ?) aesthetic, I put on some chrome tele knobs I had laying around, and voilà :
Like my sister would say, "your guitar needs a haircut !". I put on the only new-ish set of strings I had, which is a set of 12s tapewound which didn't work out so well on my jazzmaster. I quite like it on this strat, it tames the shrillness a bit, and it's still easy to bend, it's a really nice compromise between ease of play/softness under the left hand and kinda fighting back against the pick. I cant trim the ends at the headstock because it unravels immediately if you cut below the silk ends, and I already ruined one of these expensive sets like this.
So, was it worth the time ? Yes ! It's always fun to clean up an old guitar and get it playing nice, some frets are not great especially in the higher register, the action would be nicer if it's lower but on these guitars I never know if it's the guitar or my limited setup skills that are at fault. The five positionshave a distinct and unique sound, it looks like the neck pickup is out of phase but it gives a different sounding guitar in the neck+middle position. I would like to get the trem to work, but that would mean either sourcing a compatible arm or replacing the whole thing, and I'm well aware that getting a cheap vibrato to behave is a complicated errand. I'll stop now, let's see if my friend wants his guitar back next time he comes round the house to talk gear !
Last question : Is Jim Harley a french-only cheapo brand, or is it also present in other euro countries or in the US even ? I have a les paul custom copy of this brand, and it's the same level of awfully cheap corner cutting, like the plywood body, and cool things you wouldn't expect on something this cheap.
(except my Ekos perhaps). I really can't put the guitar down.