Advice on Greco SE-600J restoration project

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Hi.

I'm planning to do some restoration on my good old SE600J. The frets are worn, the machine heads have a hard time holding the tune, the plug has a bad soldering or a loose connection somewhere and the pickups keep moving into the body after playing just a few minutes. It was a cheap buy but I really like the feel and the sound and would prefer to keep it instead of selling it to find another, so something drastic has to be done. Here are my ideas and doubts:

New frets, new machine heads and a new jack plug is the bare minimum change for the guitar to continue to be playable, but I have some more ideas ...

The middle and neck pickups are great, but the springs needs to be replaces so pickups doesn't crawl into the body every time I play. I hardly ever use the bridge pickup because it's way too bright for me, so I'm considering changing it - or maybe all three. See, the SE600J has three switches instead of the usual 5-way switch, and I really miss the 5-way switch some times, so I was thinking about changing the pick guard to a fender to get the 5-way switch. Dimarzio has a pre-wired fretboard and pickup set with some nice Area pickups. I'm considering those if its possible to fit a fender fretboard on a Greco Strat. As far as I can read it should be possible with just adding new holes for the screw since the Fender fretboards has 11 screw holes instead of 8 on the Greco. On one hand I think that it would be a great upgrade but on the other hand it also feels like taking some of the spirit away from the guitar as it's fitted with EXCEL pickups. Any thoughts or ideas regarding this is very welcome.
 
I had an SE-600J that I had fun refinishing and adding a 5-way switch and new pickguard. It was not too hard to do but I had to fill the original pickguard holes and drill some new ones. If you want to take care of the bridge pickup being so bright you can easily wire it to one of the tone controls so you can reduce the high end.

Mine was painted black over the white when I got it so I decided to strip it down and stain it black. It turned out dark grey.

Good luck whatever you do!

 
Thanks for the reply wulfman. Thats a really nice job on the SE-600J!

Did you change the machine heads? If you did - what did you put in?
 
My machine heads were ok so I never changed them. I think you could put some klusons on there but need the fatter conversion bushings for the tuner holes because the holes will be bigger than normal kluson bushings.
 
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