curtisa

I can now see what you're seeing. I've just done a hard refresh of my browser (CTRL-F5) and I've now lost the icons as well, so I must have been looking at a locally cached version of the buttons earlier. I'll have to defer to @Prostheta for more guidance...

I assume you mean the Ooznest WorkBee? 47mm of usable vertical travel isn't a lot to play with. For comparison, the body of a Strat is 44mm thick. The Shapeoko has a strong support base for entry-level CNC work and appears to be well represented. The Z height is claimed as 3" (75mm or so) which seems a bit more useful for guitar work. However the X and Y travel is done via toothed belt, which might struggle with heavy cuts and give good, repeatable accuracy. Screw-driven axes like on the WorkBee for X, Y and Z would be better. It's a shame there isn't a cross between the Shapeoko and WorkBee, marrying up the better components of the two systems.

OK - I can get something slightly different to you guys if I use MS Edge: But Chrome and Internet Explorer look fine on my PC. That said, the above is hardly a conclusive test - I'm on a corporate network at the moment and with the various IT security policies I have to deal with on a daily basis, I'm lucky to get the forums to work properly at all from the office. And I almost never use MS Edge either so I don't know if the above display is typical for me or not. I can check again when I get home tonight and I can try Firefox on my home PC, but at the moment things look more or less fine.

Everything looks fine here on my phone - Safari and Chrome, mobile and desktop versions. I'll have another look when I get to the PC in the next hour or so.

The bits are fragile, yes, and there is a programming overhead that you need to account for, but it doesn't amount to much more work than CAD'ing up the initial fret slotting layout plus maybe 15-20 minutes of computer time, which you'd do for a template/jig anyway. The last fretboard I did took a bit under an hour to slot on the mill. I could probably push things harder and get it down to 40-45mins, but for the fine bits I usually err on the side of caution. It's not like I'm in a race either. There are numerous upsides to the long slotting time though - I can just hit the 'go' button and leave it to do its thing while I do other stuff, I can do slotting operations that are physically impossible with a traditional handsaw or circular saw blade (blind fret slots where the ends aren't cut all the way through the edges of the board, fretslots where the bottoms of the channel matches the curvature of the radius applied to the top), I can do subsequent operations on the fretboard at the same time as the fret slotting (radius the board to anything including compound radii, inlay the board, cut the nut shelf with a curved or flat bottom, trim the edges to shape), I don't need to have a new template made up if I need to slot a fretboard that I haven't done before, nor do I need to keep a physical library of templates in the workshop that might only get used once.

But then you'd have to ask 'why not just CNC the multiscale slots in the fretboard directly and skip the middle step'?

I'd be more concerned that the effort in hand marking and drilling each pair of holes accounting for the scale lengths being outside the edges of the fretboard, in order to define each angled fret slot is as much work as just hand slotting the board using a printed template as a guide. The potential errors introduced in the two converging rows of alignment holes might be difficult to reign in as well. It's a neat solution, but it does seem to over-complicate the jig.

Sounds like you might need to enact the second level of not-blokeyness: ask the manufacturer. It's OK, we'll understand

Read the fecking manual. Y'know, that thing most of us blokes have trouble admitting we need to do when we get our hands on a new bit of kit and we convince ourselves we don't need no stinkin' manual

Not easily. The problem is the 2nd position where the two neck coils are in parallel. If you had the coil tap push-pull engaged when you selected the neck-in-parallel position on the 5-way you'd end up with no output. You could rewire the neck coil tap to work on the parallel-coils position as a 'coil disconnect' rather than a traditional coil cut, but the neck pickup would go dead any time you selected a position that used the full neck humbucker mode (ie positions 3 and 5) and you left the coil tap engaged, which creates more pickup selection headaches than the first option.

Here's another experiment to try: what if you unbolt all three pots and lift them out of the cavity so that the cases no longer make contact with the shielding paint - does it still hum? Note that you'll have to temporarily reinstall the black ground wire you removed between the tone pot and the middle volume pot in order to perform this test.

The EMG pickup typically includes internal protection to prevent reverse-polarity from damaging anything (it's still relatively easy to install the battery back to front in many guitars. EMG will be aware of this and will have designed their pickups to withstand such an error). From memory the quick connector is not polarised and can be installed either way up on the pickup, hence my query. But if you've discounted that then all good. Which black wire? This one (with the red dash)?: If you've removed the ground wire indicated you're probably still getting continuity via the pot cases being secured to the black conductive paint inside the cavity. That isn't the source of a ground loop though, and the wire will have been specifically run to ensure that the ground continuity between the various points in the circuit remains constant and secure. With the indicated ground wire removed, if the nut on the tone pot became loose you'd end up with pickups that can hum and buzz as the ground connection makes and breaks intermittently in sympathy with the loose tone pot. Even the higher resistance of the black paint compared to a direct wire might be enough to cause hum issues.

It won't be a ground loop. Can you confirm that you have the quick connect on the back of each pickup terminated the right way around? What happens if you temporarily run a wire from the back of one of the pots to the strings?

No Strat clones for you then

Mind you, that's with 25.5" scale length as a comparison on a standard 6 string acoustic. I actually have no idea what is common for acoustics - I'm guessing somewhere around the 25" mark? That would lower the tension somewhat in the comparison sixer, above. So maybe not entirely all in your head, then?

Stringjoy tension calculator says: vs a standard 11-52 acoustic set over the same distance: Not a whole lot different really.

You might want to be careful, Andy. You'll carve out a name for yourself in the future as that guy who'll build nothing but left-of-field creations. Guy #1 in pub - "I'm really interested in getting a 19 string lefthanded fretless alto mandolin made up". Guy #2 in pub - "Really? I hear there's this chap up in Derbyshire..." <Later> Andy - "Can't I just make you a Strat copy? I've been dreaming of making Strat clones. They even hung me up the right way around yesterday..."

In recent years I've noticed an upswing in the mentions of a notched straightedge being a necessary tool for fret levelling. I think it's important to note that a notched straightedge is primarily intended to reveal physical abnormalities in the fretboard itself, not the frets. Even the example given on the Stewmac youtube channel about their notched straightedge is showing off its abiity to reveal a neck with a hump around the 3rd fret, the proposed fix being to remove some of the frets altogether and spot-level the fretboard itself before reinstalling new fret wire, rather than re-fret and re-level the whole neck If you're confident the problem on the neck around the 11-18 fret position is due to there being something funny going on with the fretboard being unusually shaped (a bulge, a sag) then yes, the notched straightedge will show this for you. But the fix for that problem is much more involved than just doing a spot level, as Stewmac allude to in their product video. Personally I think a regular, unnotched straightedge should tell you enough about the neck's condition to make an assessment on the fret crowns themselves, which is where the playing actually goes on. The LTD ships from the factory with XJ (extra jumbo?) frets, so unless the frets are seriously worn, have been replaced in the past with lower fretwire or there is something really horrid going on with the neck/fretboard (in which case you're looking at a much more significant repair anyway) there should be more than enough meat left in them to withstand a fret level based on the crowning height of the existing frets determined with a plain straightedge. Don't discount loose frets either. Maybe the frets in question have sprung up slightly out of their slots, in which case a fret level might not help, and in some cases can make things worse. Attempting to level a 'springy' fret with respect to surrounding 'solid' frets can be a bit like chasing your own tail - you level the loose fret by applying pressure and take the top off, but when you stop filing it springs back up again. You check it with a straightedge or rocker and find it's still high, so you take more off and so on and so on. You finally get it 'level' and string up the guitar, but whenever you fret a string on to it it sinks back down again and now you get fret buzz due to it being too low when fretting pressure is applied.

Kinda. You'd get a fixed high cut when in single coil mode equivalent to a tone control set to minimum with a .022uF capacitor, and a fixed high cut (with some added weirdness) when in humbucker mode equivalent to a tone control set to minimum with a .044uF capacitor (ie, very, very dark-sounding).

If you mean the two switching functions on the one humbucker, unfortunately not.

Strapping the extra capacitor across the two neck pickup leads will darken the neck pickup and leave the bridge pickup unaffected. The catch is that with a standard Tele 3-way switch, when the middle (both pickups) position is selected the extra capacitor will darken both neck and bridge simultaneously.

Yep. Nope. If it did you'd no longer be able to put the upper pickup in series with the bottom one. Because the way it's implementing the coil split function is to short out the unwanted coil to itself. This is necessary if the series/parallel switch is to be used. Shorting out a coil to ground on the upper pickup if in series mode would result in the bottom pickup being completely muted. Have a closer look at the bottom pickup - the shorting of one coil to itself is the same, the only difference being that the south coil is cut rather than the north. Yes. The two push-pull switches can be used in any combination, although there will be a bit of weirdness regarding the behaviour of the volume pots and 3-way toggle switch when in series mode. If everything is on 10 and the upper pickup is selected, going in to series mode works as expected. The upper volume pot controls the overall volume of the two pickups in series, but the lower volume pot does nothing. If in series mode and the middle (both) pickup position is selected the series function gets a bit weird and the lower volume pot acts as a pseudo-blend between series and parallel while the upper volume pot controls the overall volume of the series chain. If the neck pickup is selected the series function is lost and the operation returns to regular neck pickup operation. It works, but you have to think a bit about what your controls are doing if you need to do a quick change between pickup selections.

As much as anything this thread is a lesson in photography!

Yes, although it might take some experimentation with different value capacitors to find the right amount of treble taming to suit your needs. Try clipping a capacitor across the two outer lugs of the bridge pickup volume pot and swap in different value caps until you find the right one. The smaller the value of the cap, the less apparent treble reduction it causes.

What you really meant to say was, 'that dark line on the heel is entirely intentional and I specifically chose the timber for the neck so that it would reveal itself as a feature as I carved into it'.