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I have a 2001 H535, with HRW's. The switch tip has a black dot (and black tips have a white or cream dot). The pickups have the double height adjust screws, as do the regular Schaller humbuckers. (HRW's are made with the same hardware from Schaller). They are also marked on the back of the pickups as HRW in ink.

I went with Farber, including the insert bushings. Super happy with the results, especially my 2001 H535 which came with the same Schaller roller bridge and top-load tail piece. I had to wait on getting the inserts for the H535, so I played for a while with just the Farber bridge. Once I pressed the much longer steel Farber bushings into the guitar, I was amazed at how much better it sounded. The go will into the maple center block, where as the original tailpiece bushing from Schaller was very short and just mostly contacted the upper shell. My 1998 H150, came with Gibson style zinc tailpiece and a "Nashville" bridge. The Farber hardware didn't make as much sound difference, but the lighter stop bar helped my goal of reducing weight of the guitar to under 9lbs, along with replacing the Grover tuners. I find the ABR-1 style bridge more comfortable to play.

I guess we'll see. F-brand and G-brand still continue their made in USA standard lines, at the apex of their standard lines. It is undeniable that inexpensive guitars sell in higher volume and make up the bulk of revenue, at much thinner margins. The lure of inexpensive off-shore products is undeniable. Pretty much everyone with some volume is doing it. I think it waters down the brand, especially if not clearly labeled in a way that is clear what it is. Strangely, Gibson will make some Epiphone models in the US from time to time, despite its position as their off-shore less-expensive line.

Be aware that Faber website also says that Heritage tended to do different things sometimes, and to measure what you have in hand first. Some of their recommendations were not exact right for what i had in hand.

I did both my H150 and H535 with Faber and completely happy with how it turned out on both. Especially the 535, the Faber bushing inserts really got some deep contact with the wood in the center block. I wouldn’t have expected such a positive improvement from an already good guitar. My 01 535 was like yours with the Schaller hardware. My 98 H150 came with Gibson style stop tail and Nashville bridge from the factory. Traveling at the moment, I’ll look up part numbers when I get back. I did have to get a special drill bit for the 535. The factory holes were just a smidge shallow for the new tail bushings. It was to make a flat bottom hole just about 3/32 deeper. But it was well worth it. The factory tail bushings in the 535 were really short and light. The Faber bushings are normal size and fit much tighter. Search on my user name to find some comments about what I did. I would 100% do exactly the same upgrade with Faber.

That's a beauty! I have a 2001 535 with the same color scheme and curly maple and the wood pickguard they put on the older ones. I got it second hand about a year ago in pristine cosmetic condition, but with some fret issues I fixed. It is a lifetime guitar for me now. Enjoy and play it in good health.

There really isn't a better tuner than Gotoh, made in Japan. I put them on both of my vintage Heritage in place of the rotomatics. Collings uses them on their electrics, and they are very good. Grover makes many tuners in China anymore. Schaller are still making them in Germany. Waverly still makes tuning machines in the USA. There are tuning machine companies in Korea supplying Fender and others with unique tuners, like the "70's F-branded" machines on the vintage re-issues. (originally made by Schaller).

Certainly, good guitars can be made in China, or Indonesia, or Korea. The labor costs are lower overseas, environmental and worker-safety less strict, and the currency manipulation make them even cheaper. Just like Epiphone, and PRS SE and any number of Fender sub-brands, and many others, production is offshored. Some are pretty good, some are every freaking corner is cut to hit a price. The truth is that cheap guitars outsell expensive guitars, by quite a lot. What is the value of the Heritage brand? Is Heritage associated as a USA made instrument brand? Does branding imported guitars with the Heritage brand de-value the brand? Outside of a small group of guitar nerds, Heritage is kinda unknown. Even among guitar players, I get a lot of "what is that guitar?" about my H535 (it is quite a looker in curly maple natural as well as incredibly good sounding). Gibson for instance, separates the Gibson and Epiphone lines as generally, USA and offshore brands. Fender has gone both ways. When CBS sold to private investors in the 1980's, they had no factory for a while. They were building Fender-branded guitars in Japan. (I have one, they were excellent!) They also did Squier brand and some other variants for offshore, and make Fender branded instruments in Japan and Mexico as well as USA. It just seems weird to me that it is virtually impossible to make electric solid-body guitars in the USA that cost less than $2000

Yeah, both my '98 H150 and 2001 H535 are wearing Faber locking ABR bridges and tailpieces including the threaded bushing inserts. My H150 was factory equipped with a Nashville bridge and standard (heavy zinc) tailpiece instead of the Schaller hardware that was usual at the time. The bushing didn't make much difference on the H150, as the bushings installed in it were actually pretty decent. My 535 had the Schaller roller and top-loader bridge and tail. It had the really crappy short bridge bushing inserts. I used them with the Faber bridge for a while, as the holes were not drilled deep enough in the body. I got the right size and type of bit to do the job correctly and installed the longer Faber steel bushings. Wow, I was not expecting how much they improved the tone of the 535. It really just did the trick, they fit solidly into the maple center block and that seemed to couple the bridge into the body way, way better. The original bushings were so short they really didn't contact much but the laminate top. All in all, I really like the Faber hardware. Seems like a great choice by Heritage to switch.

Like I said, Schaller pickups were very very common in the late 70's through 1990's and into the early 2000's. Just about every guitar maker in that era used Schaller humbuckers. Schaller made a whole lot of different models of humbuckers as well. Even Gibson used Schaller to manufacture components and probably entire pickups. The materials and methods Schaller used to make pickups were top quality. Most Heritage Guitars of those years also featured Schaller bridges and other hardware. It was the era right as "boutique" pickups were just starting to gain in popularity. Prior to then, no one really changed pickups unless they broke. A few experimenters did things like split coils and add switches, but it wasn't common. Since the Schaller's were "stock" pickups that came with everything from inexpensive guitars on up, people tended to equate them with not being very good. Schaller was also not a player in the aftermarket, preferring to do B2B with guitar OEM's. Outfits like Duncan and Dimarzio gained a lot of notoriety, as they got associated with a lot of the new players in the 1980's when hot-rodding guitars really took off after EVH and his penchant for playing parts-guitars he crafted together himself. Schaller eventually left the pickup market, partly due to some changes in the ownership and family, and they probably saw the writing on the wall. I recently ordered a set of humbucker pickups, shipped direct from China, including shipping and tariffs, that were only $14 for the pair. Only took a week to arrive. Thing is, there's nothing wrong with them, work just fine. I don't know how anyone can compete with that pricing. Heck, I can't even buy the magnets for that much. Pickups are easy to change, and widely available, so people change them.

Actually, covers are an interesting topic, and I touched on that. Covers can and do influence the sound of a humbucker pickup, measurably. There is in fact, a physical explanation and it depends on what the cover is made of. The reason is something called eddy current. Here's a demonstration of eddy current in this video: So it turns out that metal covers over a pickup can alter the response of the pickup, in audible and measurable ways. Humbuckers and Telecaster neck pickups are particularly vulnerable to this. It turns out that brass is not a great material for pickup covers vs. nickel-silver due the magnetic and electrical properties of the metal. Sometimes a good nickel-silver cover is plated with copper to better accept the final shiny nickel or chrome plating. The copper plating will also audibly change the response of the pickup. Also, the design of the cover can be accomplished in such a way that interrupts the eddy current. Here's a link to an interesting paper on pickup covers, materials and designs. https://kenwillmott.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Pickup_Cover_Geometry.pdf

My hearing was in fact recently tested, and is just fine. Despite my age and life experience, I've managed to preserve 95-percentile hearing acuity. It isn't what it was when I was 20, but it passes and exceeds US government requirements. Humans are notoriously poor at making objective absolute judgements about sound or really much of anything. For instance, very few people have absolute pitch, and those that do, often lose it with age. Most of us though, have the ability to judge relative pitch or learn to do so. What's cold and hot, same deal. Those who are married probably understand the constant battle some of our spouses have with the thermostat, despite the electronic sensors reliably indicating the same temperature, yet, they feel too hot or too cold. (I don't recommend pressing the argument with one's spouse). Color is another area where human perception is both amazing and terrible. We perceive very slight differences comparing colors amazingly well and reliably. However, human sight is terrible at recognizing an absolute color when it is presented alone. Hence, I use test equipment when repeatable and measurable results are required. So, I can absolutely measure what any particular pickup actually does. A guitar pickup is an electromagnetic device that converts the motion of a magnetized guitar string into an electrical signal. What is presented in its magnetic field is converted into a current at the wire terminals. No human perception is involved with that, since we cannot perceive magnetic nor electrical currents, it isn't a human perception problem. If two pickups measure identically in their electrical and magnetic properties, they will function identically in their interactions with cables and amplifiers and so on and produce the same sound when processed and amplified through the same apparatus.

I've put some study into Schaller pickups, putting on my engineer hat and measuring things electronically, making Bode plots of their frequency response and other characteristics and studying how they were made. I've got a collection of them from various sources. The first point is Schaller made a LOT of pickups, especially from the late 1970's through the 1990's. They made them for just about everyone too. Hence, there are a lot variations of Schaller humbuckers, from really sweet sounding early PAF types, to slammin' hot ceramic magnet metal-monsters and some very unique ones, such as those used on the rare Fender Master Series of guitars 83-85. While they appear similar to Gibson humbuckers, Schaller's were their own thing. They're metric and none of the parts are interchangeable with imperial dimension parts, the neck and bridge units had different pole spacing. Schaller had very good winding machines, as their coils are very consistent and neatly wound. They usually have low parasitic capacitance, which generally makes them brighter and cleaner sounding. Most will have Alnico-V magnets and brass base plates. Covers are usually nickel-silver with low eddy current (desirable). So they're not "cheapy" pickups, although back in the day, people bashed them a bit since that's what often came with the instrument. If it was not Gibson and it came wtih humbuckers in it during that era, there was a really good chance they were made by Schaller. You'll see all kinds, from very typical covered to open types with hex-head or double-slug poles. Hot wound or pretty wound, ceramic or alnico, they made whatever the guitar manufacturer asked for.

That (SD 59/JB pair) is exactly what is in my Fender Robben Ford model. Curiously, the basis guitar that Robben was playing, the Fender Esprit, (have on of those too from 1984) had a very unique set of pickups that Schaller made specifically for the Fender "Master Series". While the pickups have a unique appearance and some very cool features, the LCR (inductance, capacitance, resistance) values are right in line with the '59/JB pairing. These were used on the three D'Aquisto designed Fender models made in Japan during the CBS-to-private ownership transition in the early/mid 1980s: The Esprit, The Flame and the D'Aquisto jazz guitars. They're quite nice, largely unknown and pretty rare. The Esprit was slightly changed and became the Robben Ford model. Pickups are one of those weird things. What was hailed a few years ago, is dogged on today on the internet. My H535 (2001) has the HRW pickups in it. I absolutely love them. They're similar electronically to the SD "Jazz" SH-2 set. When the HRW was a new girl in town, the online crowd praised them and now the internet talks them down. LOL. It is flavor of the month on the internet.

Funny how the authentic wear & tear isn't as artistic as the factory-produced simulated wear & tear. Just none of the marks that say, "well, that was truly unadvisable". Like the flat dent and cracked paint when the strat fell off the strap and the floor on stage one night...