GregP

This is the "making the body" post rather than the "making the neck" post, but I liked the pics better. <lol> http://buildingtheergonomicguitar.com/2007...uitar-body.html You can see that there's a mini-headstocky-kinda-thing there. Easy enough to make a volute and give your hand some extra runway. I think a lot of the Steinberg "end of the neck" thing is in our heads but FWIW I primarily agree with you. My headless guitar will have a little extra space... not as much as the Forshage, but just enough that there's "something" there to feel for. Aw, heck, I'll even post the neck build link: http://buildingtheergonomicguitar.com/2007...g-the-neck.html Always think outside the bun, I mean box. Greg

There may be something to what you say. I never thought of it in terms of sustain or anything-- to me, a really high stop tailpiece just seems shaky (which is I guess a sustain thing, though I didn't really think of it in terms of sustain) and it just looks weird. So, for me, primarily an aesthetic thing. I'm not sure how much the bending is improved by a lesser angle, but you might be right. I have a TOM + stop-tailpiece guitar sitting right here, perhaps I should give it a go. Greg

Sure you can. Steinbergers rule, IMO, and Kleins... but even better is something like Mattia's headless "travel scraps" guitar. Where the headless...ness... is such an integral part to the overall aesthetic that a headstock would actually ruin the design!

That's the whole point of a speedloader. You DO have to buy special strings and get gouged a bit for them... but they're pre-stretched to general pitch, and after dropping them in, you only need the fine-tuners to bring them into accurate pitch. A side-note to that-- some eBay vendors use the word "speedloader" to describe licensed floyds that you don't have to snip ball-ends for. Those are NOT "Speedloaders". I REALLY like headless guitars (which to me are more interesting rather than more boring) so I've always been looking out for options. I'm still worried that since the Speedloader hasn't really "caught on" it won't be long before strings are unavailable... but you never know. You can still get blank Betamax tapes if you try hard enough <laff>. Greg

Heh, I blame it all on Gibson. You seem to know what you're doing and what you want, too, though-- my opinion on the matter is therefore irrelevant. Be that as it may, is there any particular reason to want the break angle over the bridge to be the same as the angle over the nut?

Yup. Though, the heatshrink wouldn't do anything for the wire across 4 lugs.

Yeah, it's kinda nationalist to assume that Korean-made products are all crap! I don't have a "favourite" trem and I'm not a big trem guy in general. But I'm definitely more interested in the kinds of bridges already mentioned here-- the ZR, the Kahler, and the Speedloader. Add Trem-King to that, and you have a list of interesting trems to choose from. Greg

I don't know if he used it with any sort of regularity, but westhemann let me know (when I asked the very same question) that it's a quality piece of gear. I haven't had my hands on one yet, but I trust that assessment. My memory's fuzzy, but I *think* I recall him saying that he liked it as much or more than an OFR in terms of functionality if not aesthetics.

I'd be curious to see your diagram! As for the 4-lugs thing... the odds of accidentally touching the exposed wire with another wrong lead are pretty slim in most cavities... I wouldn't personally bother with 3 little loops. I can say that having already done the "bazillions of little loops" thing. I find it really fiddly and annoying to do all that claustrophobic work for no actual benefit. Remember, you will have to solder *2* wires at once doing it the "little loops" way. Once you've soldered one little loop and you go to add the next one in the series, the heat on the lug will melt the original loop's connection... so you're re-soldering it at the very least, and having to fart around holding it in place at the most. There's probably a better technique for doing the "little loops" thing than I used, but even if there is... I can't imagine it being as easy and straight forward as one bare wire across the 4 lugs. Covering it with electrical tape isn't a bad idea at all, though. The way it was worded made it sound like a "hack" or whatever, but that's what the tape is for. By all means, cover the bare wire with electrical tape if you decide to go with the 1 bare wire method. Greg

Hm? It's a soapbar P90. They don't require frames. Indeed, a frame around a soapbar pickup would just be cosmetic. It's amazing work... just beautiful. But let me be the voice of criticism-- it looks like you didn't calculate enough of a neck angle to use TOM + tailpiece. The TOM might be within acceptable parameters, though to me the ideal is to have'em all the way down in their bushings. The stop tailpiece seems hella high, though, no?

The entire size of the bobbin is different, so it'll be more than just a screwhole mod, too.

You can get Warmoth from sources other than Warmoth? That'd be handy information... which vendors?

Nicely done!

Yes, exactly. You're still down to a humbucker, not a single-coil. By "splitting" the quad-rails/motherbucker, you reduce it down to the equivalent of something like a Hot Rails. If you had all for coils in series (which would be typical), you could have ended up with that high resistance. It's just the way you described reading all the coloured wires, it didn't seem like it was all put into series. In any event, a high DC resistance is often indicative of high output. You generally lose some of your high end clarity as a sacrifice.

Either way, the inserts will be sunk into the wood. You could just scrape off some of the "coating" if it's not conductive.

There's a tutorial around here somewhere about making piezo pickups with Radio Shack buzzers, etc. I think it comes down to the same thing as the one you linked to, though. There's no reason it wouldn't work. In fact, one of the commercially-available piezo systems for upright bass is just 2 small piezo disks which you can mount on the bridge. The cool thing about piezos (apparently-- I have to admit, I've never done the Radio Shack project) is that you can put them almost anywhere on the instrument that picks up vibrations. You can even think outside the box and try them in places other than the bridge. Greg

A Gibson-style 3-way switch won't do what you want. To be honest with you, I can't tell exactly what combination of pickups you want, or if it would be possible with any 3-way switch at all. The extra-large font is making for distracting reading, too. You're describing what you think you want the pickups attached to, rather than listing the combinations you want. It's tough to sort out. You might want to rephrase more like this: pos 1: bridge + middle pos 2: all pickups together pos 3: neck pickup only (or whatever) But truthfully, I don't know that a gibson-style 3-way all by itself is going to do what you want. At best, and if they even MAKE such a thing, you would need a "4-pole" switch of some variety.

You can ground floyd bridges...! But you're not grounding your wiring "to" the bridge. You're grounding your bridge (and other components) TO the ground lug of the output jack. Definitely ground your bridge; otherwise, nothing will happen when you touch the strings. -- In general, sounds like you have a ground loop. The most sure-fire way to avoid a ground loop is to create a "star grounding" scheme. All this means is that all of your grounds (including desoldering the bent vol knob lug from the casing and attaching a wire instead) will go to one central "collector" like a metal O-ring or something. And I mean ALL the grounds. Then, once they're all soldered there, you run a final wire from the "star" to the output jack's ground lug. Use electrical tape on any exposed ground wires and wrap up your star, and you should be set. -- Probably not the cause, but check this out: I rewired my lap steel 2 nights ago. Got a diagram, figured everything out, decided to just use a pot casing as my "star" for grounding (it was only a Hum + vol + jack!), and thought I had followed the (very simple) diagram perfectly. Hummed like mad, particularly when I touched the strings. "Ground problem!" I thought... but I couldn't for the life of me trace it. I desoldered everything except the jack (which of course, was wired perfectly, right?) and used alligator clips to shift things around and test a different configuration. Mainly, I thought that because the pickup was an unknown pickup (a generic rails pickup from a Kramer) that I had got the wire colours mixed up (I used an SD diagram). To make a long story short, it was only after testing a few configs with no success that I somehow managed to notice that my output jack was wired in reverse. -- The moral of the stories: Star ground everything. And, in addition to your other trouble-shooting, triple-check that your output jack is wired correctly. Greg

So nice. <wibble> That's a pair of beauts.

Looks like a Kramer Quad-Rails humbucker to me, though they usually had "Quad Rails" stamped right on it. There should be specs on the internet somewhere, which might still prove useful even if it's just a clone. Regarding the shielding-- yes, it has to be gapless and continuous to be truly effective. Back to the 'bucker. When you say you want to "split the coils" do you mean reduce down to a single humbucker, or all the way down to a single-coil? Those quad-style buckers always seemed so... "wrong" to me. <chuckle> Greg

Not quite detailed enough in the areas most of our members want to know about, but a cool read nonetheless: http://ebass.nl

For the price, I don't see a big enough improvement with the Callaham over the Wilkinson.

Awesome. I had thoughts of doing a similar thing with a table saw that would require a different approach but follows a similar premise. This looks much cleaner, much less full of risk of burn, tearout, etc., and overall more efficient. Thanks for sharing! Now I just gotta find friends with a jointer... Greg

That's typical of Piezo bridges, though, on acoustic guitars as well but particularly on solidbodies. You won't find one without that characteristic piezo sound. At best, it's a passable version of something our ears perceive as "acoustic-ish". For my custom order, the idea wasn't so much to have access to an "acoustic" sound but rather to be able to blend in that unique "piezo" sound with the magnetics for a huge range of otherwise impossible tones. It's even cleaner than a clean low-output single-coil. Plus, not prone to EMI/RFI... <3 Greg

Yes, but although I asked the question, it was more for curiousity-- the main thing is that yes it will work in terms of string spacing, etc., but that you need to make sure the angle over the nut is going to be sufficient. I think it probably would be, I just want to throw that out there as something to consider. Greg