Guitar upgrades!

The beginning:
A freshly put together parts-caster guitar came in for a few upgrades!
 Here are its initial specs:
-mighty mite chunky maple neck
-candy apple red finished alder body with pool rooting
-wilkinson singlecoil pickups on a black pickguard
-gotoh tuners
-fender tremolo

Pickup replacement:

 The guitar had a value set of Wilkinson ceramic single coil pickups on. These pickups are pretty decent but the owner wanted to get a larger variety of tones. So we decided to place a set of vintage Fender MIJ singlecoil pickups at the middle and neck position for that extra twang plus a rail humbucking pickup at the bridge position for modern style overdriven tones.
 But there was a bit of noise coming from the old MIJ pickups and the hot rail humbucker could easily produce a bit of feedback at max. gain amp settings.
 So, I decided to wax the pickups to eliminate any microphonic noise or vibrations. Waxing the pickups takes a bit of time but it's an easy thing to do if you monitor the temperature of the hot wax at all times. It's definitely worth potting your pickups even if they're new as the noise level gets way lower.

 The guitar wiring got changed too and these are the new controls: master volume, master tone and bridge variable split! The second tone pot became the variable split control for the bridge humbucker which is pretty useful as this pickup is really hot!

Neck re-profiling and refinish:

 The neck was a bit chunky as it had a full C profile and the finish wasn't that smooth and comfortable. So I sanded down the old lacquer and changed the neck profile to a softer D one. The neck was finally finished in satin clear for extra playability.

The final setup/maintenance:

 For the finale, the nut slots were filed properly and I used some nut sauce for lubrication. The fret edges were smoothed out with a fret file and the frets got a light leveling job to eliminate a couple of dead spots on the board.
 The black volume knob was changed for a matching cream white one and the guitar was set up right with a fresh set of coated 0,09" strings.
 The guitar is now really smooth and fun to play with. The neck is comfortable and the pickups produce a new variety of sounds. It was really worth doing all these upgrades and mods to unlock the potential of the guitar.

Here are a few pictures of the guitar (click to enlarge):