How "standardized" is control placement?

[asmith]

Boot up your imagination, and run with me on this question.

You have a Fender American-made Stratocaster. Behind the pickguard, inside the control cavity, the bottom of all the potentiometers and the blade switch have been glued to a thin piece of wood. You unscrew all these components from the pickguard. Because they're glued to the wood, they come away from the pickguard as one, and their position relative to each other remains fixed.

You also have a Fender Mexican-made Stratocaster, a Japanese-made Squier Stratocaster, a Korean-made Squier Stratocaster, and a G&L Tribute Legacy. You remove the pickguards from all these guitars. Then, you remove all the controls from the pickguards.

You now have a few empty pickguards from non-American-made Stratocaster guitars, and you have a piece of wood with the controls from an American-made Stratocaster glued to it, positioned in their original "American positions".

Do the components from your American-made Stratocaster, in their "American positions", fit neatly into the pickguards from the non-American-made guitars? If not, do the American controls at least fit neatly into any of the Mexican-, Japanese- or Korean-made Stratocaster pickguards?

If you have an answer to this, I wonder if you also have an answer apropos the four control knobs on a Gibson Les Paul / Epiphone Les Paul / ESP LTD / etc.

🙏

[JohnH]

I wish I had enough guitars to answer that!

My guess (only) would be that US and Mex would probably align ok, since they use similar internal parts. Beyond that, anything in the Fender family is probably close since they can use the original body shape, but might not be a 100% perfect drop-in because the switch and pots may be different.

Not sure about the Gibson/Epiphone family either.

As a quick/dirty test, have you tried overlaying catalogue photos with your 'Photoshop'-like tool of choice?

[asmith]

Feb 10, 2024 15:17:57 GMT -5 JohnH said:

I wish I had enough guitars to answer that!

Haha, my issue exactly.

As a quick/dirty test, have you tried overlaying catalogue photos with your 'Photoshop'-like tool of choice?

I tried this with Fender and Squier Strats and with Gibson and Epiphone LPs. In both cases, the angle of the camera between even standardized product shots on e.g. Thomann.de is not perfect, and it's hard to tell what accurately matches reality. Re the Strats: the Fender's three potentiometers look almost-identically positioned, with the volume control possibly being a little closer to the strings than on the Squier. The blade switch looks slightly further from the controls on the Squierm too. Again, it could simply be the camera's angle. Re the Les Pauls: while the four controls are not placed in the same location as a group, it looks like they're identically-spaced and -positioned relative to each other. Again, it's hard to tell for sure.

[newey]

Just a guess, but my guess would be that, if the pickguards don't interchange, then it's unlikely that the control positions are identical. I believe US and Mex Fender guards do interchange, but Squier do not, so my suspicion would be yes for US-Mex but no for Squier vs either of the others. But, no way to check it for sure as JohnH said above.

[cynical1]

The best answer I have is "it depends". Standardization in the early days revolved more around what components were cheap...I mean really cheap....then how to fit them into a hole in the wood.

No voodoo or mojo was harmed or required during this process.

HTC1

[asmith]

OK, so I'm concluding that the answer to my question is pretty much, "it's not."

Thanks folks