I'm shopping for a new bridge bucker to convert my Carvin Bolt to HSS. Recommendations?

8K ohms?

That would probably work well. What value pots do the current pickups utilize?

I have a couple of carvin factory pickguards, one HSS and SSS...all the single coils are Carvin AP11s.

Testing has revealed something odd about the Carvin SSS pickguard that might be good for you to know.

Using the same guitar, it's quite apparent that the HSS pickguard, and more importantly WIRING, provides a much beefier, lower voiced set of sounds...even with the humbucker split.

Using the same guitar with the SSS pickguard, even with the same AP11s, the sound is thinner and higher voiced...almost brittle.

The pots etc are about the same but the wiring varies dramatically.

And if your SSS is like mine, there is another cap thrown in there. As you probably know, the toggle switch is supposed to get the bridge/neck sound. What it really does is...not much. I may have a bad pickguard...or it's just designed that way...with bad results.

My next electrical learning opportunity is to transplant two of the AP11s into a used HSS, and then slap some pre-dinosaur bar magnet AP11s into this SSS but I'll have to get rid of the toggle switch design, and figure out how to get it back to a "normal" wiring. This might take me a year...

So. If your SSS is like mine, it could be designed in a way to sound "high, thin, and brittle". Not my favorite sound but it might work for something !

If you want it different, then you might consider rewiring it, building a custom HSS, or buying a stock Kiesel HSS or another loaded pickguard. Please note however, that Kiesel totally messed up MY HSS, didn't check it before sending it out, didn't return 3 emails and 2 calls, and banned me from their site for complaining about it. The worst ever customer service indeed ! They deserve to go out of business, and probably are.

Also, their main humbucker(22) is a little too muddy for me, and I use it less than 1% of the time, usually for some unique effect sound. I use the split though.

But for sure, I am NOT a fan of the higher, brittle voice of the Kiesel SSS. Because I am only using AP11s other than the humbucker, I suspect(and hope) it's that extra cap wired in there because I'd really like ALL my AP11s to sound the same in both pickguards. So far, they don't !