Putting a steel baseplate on a Tele bridge pickup (DIY)

I was absolutely fed up with the quality of Telecaster bridge pickup baseplates from Allparts … they were either misshapen, or had the wrong size holes drilled, or were thin and tinny. A good steel baseplate makes all the difference to a Telecaster bridge pickup … and with Squier/Fender only supplying useless (except for shielding) brass baseplates on many of their otherwise okay pickups … it makes sense for Tele owners to put good quality aftermarket baseplates on their less expensive Fender pickups. 

Sadly Allparts are the only suppliers of baseplates we could find in the UK, and we didn’t fancy importing them! We also didn’t want to fit crappy sub-standard baseplates to our Oil city pickups … so we got our own baseplates precision laser cut. We are now making those baseplates available to all Tele owners in a kit with attached ‘bypass earth’ modification.  This mod more easily allows ‘phase’ switches to be used on Teles. They even have the funky ‘gun-blued’ finish our Oil City pickups sport!

The first step is to remove the standard Squier brass baseplate (if fitted).

You need to clip the short earth tag to the baseplate here:

Then remove the screws holding the baseplate on:

There will be some claggy wax hanging about on the pickup base that will stop Copydex glue, double sided tape or silicone sealant sticking … Cue a standard household iron and some kitchen paper …. don’t do this if the bobbin is one of the plastic sort however. Holy melted gloop batman!

I decided to use a little double sided tape to attach the baseplate and then pot the pickup in wax afterwards. It’s not really necessary to pot if your pickup already has been (and that's most these days),

Here’s the final result fresh from the wax potting bath … I string wound the coil to get a little of that old fifties mojo … it doesn’t really do anything on top of the tape that was there already, but it looks nice!