While they had the pickguard off this "holy grail", there was a mysterious looking, epoxied Preamp in it, disabled of course. So, my tech-brain kicked in and wondered what the hell it was! So I looked it up by searching for "Mighty Mite Preamp" online and found the exact preamp - the Mighty Mite S80.

For those that don't know, Mighty Mite was among some of the first aftermarket guitar parts manufacturers, and one of their biggest clients early on (%lt 1981) was CHARVEL. Charvel, as we know, was sort of the company that ushered in the whole Superstrat era that somewhat informed later others like Kramer and was the nucleus that started Jackson. Edward Van-Halen put Charvel on the map because he was using parts from their shop to assemble his own guitars (ie Boogie Bodies by Lynn Ellsworth, Mighty Mite, and so on), to build the Frankenstrat and Bumblebee guitars out of in the late 1970's. So as soon as he had one, Tom McDermott and apparently Don Dokken went to get guitars from them (Dokken also had a Charvel Star, and Lynch's original Tiger Strat MIGHT have also been one - honestly, I need to go do some digging again to refresh my memory).

Anyway, as I have this Vester Superstrat I'm rebuilding with a whack-o-chambering in the back of the body with lots of room to put in some really elegant Electronics work (as a luthier, my biggest point of expertise is wiring and electronics trickery). So then I was thinking "If I put a Sustainer in this thing....what about running everything through a PREAMP on the output for a boost too - maybe even make the preamp switchable. The preamps are affordable still, despite being vintage, and might have been something someone would have picked up around 1990 New-Old-Stock from a Yuban coffee can in the back of some random local guitar shop, so why not!

But when I started researching the S80, it seems wiring diagrams are, well, non-existant. So I was able to determine the wiring looking at various E-bay auctions and Reverb postings - including a N.O.S. one with a box style stereo output jack - which showed the common ground, link for the negative line of the battery, and the ground wire, are all linked up to the jack on the pins. Keep in mind, I might be incorrect on the grounds, but I also saw another picture of one with the 9v connector attached to the red wire. I'll say this, Mighty Mite did a very elegant job on this preamp - the ribbon of wires coming out of it is like a sunset going from black to yellow with brown, red, orange, in between. The orange is the ouput obviously since it was going to the "tip" The trim pot controls the "Gain". I put my diagram below...