Like the 60 cycle vid, my Guild vibrato had a clunk on deeper dives. I dropped in an AV trem into the Guild body plate, it was a direct fit. I compared the fulcrum plate to the AV, the Guild plate was thin and the point wasn’t bent as far down as the AV. All other dimensions were pretty much the same. When I strung it up, the problem was clear: the string holes dropped too low and it bottomed out before any significant dive
![Cry :'(](./images/smilies/cry.gif)
. What made the problem worse was the fact the Guild plate is 0.03” thicker than the AV’s. The slot width was about the same between the two.
I tried keeping the pivot, but same issue. In the end I drilled out the Guild spacer plate to accept the AV spring and left it at that. I sanded the pivot point and now it’s smooth af, no click. Working the Guild vibe revealed very little hardening, it was easy to both hand sand the pivot edge and drill the 3/8” bore for the spring.
The trem/vibrato was hardly a con, but I had to see if I could improve it. TBH as soon as I found out about the Deluxe version I was already sold. The HB-2 was the only negative for me: my previous Guild had Cordoba HB-1s and I was constantly trying to make it a Filtertron, but not actually use a Filterton. The HB-2 balances pretty well with the other pickups, but it’s obviously darker.
The Strat-ish pickups do exactly what I wanted them to do. Quack. Shave heads off with brightness. Twang. I don’t want to touch them, they do it for me. Finish was great, no bad frets. Locking tuners, love ‘em. Neck is skinny for me, but it’s average C. I don’t like the scarf joint but I’m not gonna stare at it—I knew what I was in for
![Tongue :P](./images/smilies/tongue.gif)
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