White plastic shelf edging was then applied to the top and bottom edges to protect them from damage. The guitar features three single-coil pick-ups and a custom-made aluminium bridge. May purchased a set of Burns Tri-Sonic pick-ups and covered the coils of two with Araldite epoxy to reduce microphonics. The middle pickup remained uncoated and this is understood to have been modified in the early 1980s when DiMarzio examined the Red Special when designing pickups for the first Guild replica. The magnet was turned over to change its polarity and the wires on the solder posts swapped (to mimic a reverse wound coil) which made his favoured pickup combination of bridge and middle in phase humbucking. He originally wound his own pick-ups, as he had for his first guitar, but he did not like the resulting sound because of the polarity of these pick-ups: alternating North-South instead of all North.