Who this kit is for:

The Vintage Upgrade Kits offer a warmer, woody tone for anyone who is tired of not being able to use the controls on your guitar effectively. This kit is also great for those who are tired of losing tone and note-definition every time they roll their control past 8!! This kit is designed for all Strat® style guitars.

Please Note: All guitars manufactured in Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia and Mexico use metric pots (6mm), and have metric sized holes drilled for the pots. All pots sold by RS Guitarworks use standard pots and hole diameters (3/8"). Therefore, holes in the guitar, plates and/or pickguards will need to be enlarged to 3/8" to fit properly. Also, metric knobs will not fit the RS pot shafts; most popular knobs are available on the store in new and aged versions. Please call us for details or questions about installation.

What this is:

For years, guitar manufacturers have chosen to cut corners on the electronics they have used, even in their top-of-the-line guitars. This kit is designed to utilize the best electronic components possible in your guitar. This kit is the culmination of thousands of hours of research and development into different guitar electronics and how each of them affects the overall tone of the guitar.

What's in the kit:

(1) 280K RS Split-Shaft SuperPot® - We designed these pots in conjunction with CTS. Used for the volume controls in the kit, these pots have a custom taper that gives you a noticeable difference between each number on your volume control. You can finally roll your volume down to 2 or 1 and not lose any clarity, even in the neck position!! Mil-spec construction and a smoother resistor path make this the best pot to ever be used in the guitar.  

(2) 250K CTS Split-Shaft Audio taper pots - Audio taper pots work great for tone controls. With that in mind, we had CTS improve their stock audio taper pot by using brass shaft construction (brass is much more resilient than the typical aluminum,) and much tighter tolerances. 

(1) Vintage RS GuitarCap Paper In Oil .047µF Capacitor. Manufactured to RS specs, these hand-made 100v caps have a rich vintage tone, while still retaining open top-end clarity. Hand-wound on 50's-era machines, the new RS Vintage GuitarCaps use vintage-correct Kraft paper, solid military-spec construction and tinned 20AWG leads for easy soldering. They really hold their own against the vintage caps; their tone is similar to the famous caps from the 50's.

(1) Vintage-style cloth-covered wire.

(1) Swithcraft® output jack - Made in the USA. 

(1) CRL® 5-Way switch - Made in the USA.  

(1) Color wiring diagram.

This kits is wired as standard Volume - Neck Tone - Bridge Tone however from the drop down menu you can select Vintage which has the bottom tone control wired to the Middle Pickup, no bridge tone control, or Modified where the bottom tone control is wired to the Bridge Pickup also.

Easy Solder:

This kit is offered with easy solder connection which includes a terminal block soldered onto the volume pot with screws to attach the 3 twisted ground pickup wires and the ground wire from the claw.  We have fitted high qiality gold plated push connectors to the socket (see the last image).  You only have to solder the hot pickup wires to the CRL switch.

Potentiometer/Kit Selection Table