Well, I was digging through my parts bin and decided to enable the mute tonight, I decided to shim the neck and raise the action enough that the mute would just be touching the strings and not making them sharp, this is a pretty cool feature when set up well, I already have some riff ideas around it coming around. Here's some pretty explicit pics...
Here's the side view, probably one of the most aggressive looking side views of a guitar I've seen, the action looks higher than it really is here. I raised the bridge, lowered the saddles just a mere tad bit, and have the mute where it lightly touches the strings enough to mute them without pushing them sharp like I've heard. The pickups are held in by some #6X1-1/4" wood screws from Home Depot, which hold them very strongly to the wood, giving a good firm contact to the body.
A corner shot showing the claws and mute on the guitar a little more cleanly, as well as the really tight breakover the bridge.
Here's a picture of my mildly standard Jagmaster. Mine's one of the newer Jagmaster II's with the 24" scale neck, which looks to me like Fender just cut a fret off a 24" scale neck and rounded the heel closer to the 21st, and put it on a 25.5" scale Jagmaster body.
Here's a front view of the Jagmaster. So far I've shimmed the neck, put pencil lead in the nut, raised the saddles, a very slight truss rod tweak, and loosened the trem springs. It already plays much better than it did when I got it. It's got a pretty close sound to a Gibson SG with some mild Jazzmaster frequencies mixed in, so I"m keeping the stock pickups.
