First I want to start by thanking Charlie_Watt who has been very helpful and regularly communicated with me through this process. Please feel free to offer any comments and suggestions. This was my first of 2 upgrades so I will have another one coming up after testing this one.
I started out with a stock Variax 500 bridge.
I used an Exacto knife to scrape away the conformal coating to expose the copper ground plane.
With some solder wick, I removed the blobs of solder from the original piezo installation and removed the original saddles. I used the carpet needle shown in this picture to enlarge the holes just big enough to allow a passthrough for the ghost wires. After enlarging the holes, I used a multi meter to make sure that each pickup signal pad was still isolated from ground.
I cut the wires attached to the Ghost saddles at a length of .75" (3/4"), used the Exacto knife to separate the two wires, the silver is the HOT wire and the blue is GROUND. I found that the #28 stripper size on these Ideal strippers was the perfect gauge for prepping the wires. I pre-tinned each of the ends and pre-tinned the pads on the flex circuit. By doing this, very little heat was required to make the final connection. This keeps the insulation from being unnecessarily stressed.
I tucked the extra wire up underneath the saddle so that it would have room to travel during intonation adjustment.
Here is the finished solder job.
And the top view.
Here is the guitar that this bridge will be installed in. It's a Warmoth body with 500 neck and guts.
When I upgrade the next bridge, I plan to locate the ground connection points as shown in this picture.