reddwarf

The 21 fret neck might fit but it depends on the 22 that was on it. Is it an overhanging 22 fret neck? If so they should be interchangeable like many fender guitars. If not, the necks may be slightly different in length and mount differently. Best to stay with a 22 fret neck.

The posts had to be drilled, you can see the post hole peeking through on the bass side. Fortunately the post hole on the treble side was in perfect alignment for the corner of the trem hole route. There is also a small route under the stock bridge that the cable runs up through, it just happened to be in the perfect place for the front edge of the trem route. Measure 20 times and route once ! The concern was also wires running through the body, luckily none in that area. The only wires of concern were in the rear cavity route. The pickup wires run through the body so careful attention was needed to keep them out of the way when routing the back. The last thing to do it secure the wiring to the bridge so there is no pull on the plug and circuit board. I found some pictures of the JTV69 bridge and tried to emulate the wiring as best as possible. The wires had to be run overtop the bridge due to the length of wire available and position of the main circuit board, unlike the 69 that runs across the side of the sustain block.

I have seen a couple posts regarding the possibility of a Graphtec Floyd Rose on a JTV 59. After much work and frustration I have successfully achieved the transplant. Being that my main guitar is a Les Paul with a Floyd I found my JTV 59 not getting the playing time it deserved. To be clear I DO NOT recommend attempting this transplant for the novice..... Without woodworking experience and the proper tools it can be a catastrophic failure. I have done many tremelo retrofits and a couple Variax transplants and even with that experience I was very hesitant to route away my $1500 guitar. One wrong route and it's game over. The most frustrating part was the wiring, by adding the floating bridge and springs, the added noise caused the 12 string and alt tunings to pickup extra notes and be terribly wonky and warbly. At first I thought it may have been the bridge but after some rewiring and taming of the spring noise (by adding some foam in the trem cavity and under the piezo wires) it works great! With the graphtec nut and addition of Schaller locking tuners a locking nut is most likely not required.

I insert an Fx loop in the second channel (input set to Variax) and route that out of the FX send to a mixer. That way I can control it via the HD500 and have the direct acoustic variax sound. I could find no other way to get a decent sound out of the HD500 when using acoustic patches. The difference is night and day. It is very surprising that the HD500 was not designed with this in mind and a preamp for the acoustic sounds. A major oversite in my opinion, that along with no global reverb or delay and a tiny screen you cannot read on stage unless you have a magnifying glass.