Snagged this on eBay as a husk (no pickups or pickup rings). All the other electronics were still there. This is what I started out with.
On the bench it went. Touched up the scratches and dings (not as many as you would think) and cleaned and polished the bridge and saddles. I bought some 15:1 covered gear (semi-closed) tuners for it but turns out in 40 years they manufacturers are now putting the mounting holes on the opposite corners. I went through pages and pages on Amazon and zip. I had a set of mini 15:1 sealed tuners with keystone buttons. I decided the keystones didn't look right for a Cardinal so I replaced them with a set identical to the originals I had bought for another project and never used. I didn't bother trying to fill and hide the original tuner holes, after all it is over 40 years old.
Some years ago I was a huge fan of the MMK45 pickups but not so much any more. I prefer the MMK53 now (think PE-R60). As there were no pickups with this I installed a set of Duncan Designed HB103s (Duncan Mayhem clones) I had sitting around and they sound GREAT. I'm not much of a fan of out of phase and the coil cut on the Cardinals cut the same coil in each pickup. I removed the original switches (keeping them intact) and added separate coil cuts for each pickup. The bridge I cut the north coil and neck the south so with both on coil cut mode I get that chimey frequency cancellation you would expect from say the 2nd and 4th pickup selector position you'd have on a Strat. I love how the Cardinals play. They almost play themselves. The neck is perfect and frets are almost 100%.
Here are the finished shots:
