curtisa

What do you mean by moving it where you want it? Do you mean left-to-right, trying to rotate it within the pocket such that you alter the degree the strings follow the edges of the fretboard?

A perfect summary of how this kind of thing works, I think. Wood. Tools. Stuff. SomethingsomethingMagic *poof* Guitar!

That is monstrous. In a good way, of course

Beer helps. Just don't do the next task after you've had too many 16th fret body join and 25.5" scale length makes it a relatively long-necked instrument, although I suppose nothing is standard in this build. Any thoughts about how much overhang on the soundhole you're allowing for the fretboard?

The use of a zero fret shouldn't change the neck angle requirements of your build. The height of the strings at the nut with the use of a zero fret should be nearly identical to that of a well cut nut. The requirement for neck angle is entirely goverened by the height of the bridge, which you compensate for by either recessing the bridge into the face of the guitar, raising the neck up to bring the fretboard closer to the strings, or introducing negative neck angle to bring the strings closer to the fretboard.

I'd still argue that two recorded examples and a single reissue 59 that you personally own makes for a very limited sample set. How much of athe perceived original 59's tonal fingerprint is down to the thing simply being 60 years old? Is it universally repeatable across multiple examples of other '59 LPs? And can you make such a judgement given that all three of your benchmarks would have been plugged into different signal chains at different points in history and played/listened to differently?

But you're listening to the sound of the guitar tempered by whatever the recording chain was - the amp, the speaker, pedals (if any), the amp/pedal settings, the speaker brand, the number of speakers in the cab, the microphone position, the microphone choice, any processing during recording, any post-processing after recording. At best a recording of a guitar done by somebody else will be a guideline as to how you expect it to sound. Your true perceptions of how the guitar actually sounds vs what you think it should sound like will only be meaningful if you're there interacting directly with it. Dunno. One person's 'boomy' is another person's 'warm'. I've not played a Gibson LP of any variety, but personally I'd be cautious of assuming that common (internet?) knowledge had it that a particular model and year of guitar would be widely regarded as 'the best sounding.' Best sounding relative to what? In the context of what style of music? What signal chain? Does your interpretation of the tonal qualities of the instrument and the signal chain it's being run through align with other listeners'?

Without knowing the true nature of the pickup on your guitar, I'd say it's probably correct enough to make it work. Some investigation on your part is still required to work out what that green wire is doing but as I mentioned before, if my suspicion is correct it's probably a stray bridge ground that needs to be added to the back of one of your pots

Looks fine to my eyes. Maybe have a look at this video. Is your preamp and pickup similar to the one here? At several points throughout the video he highlights some potential failure modes and fixes that can occur with the Takamine pickup assembly.

You'd have to try and inspect inside the cavity to see where that green wire goes. It could be a ground wire for the bridge, in which case it could be re-soldered to the back of the pot on the left. I think there's more wrong with the wiring than just those two wires hanging out though. The pot on the right isn't doing anything as it isn't connected to any part of the circuit other than ground - could this be a tone pot perhaps? The left-most pot (maybe volume?) is missing a termination on the lefthand lug. The output jack has nothing attached to it other than ground. You could potentially terminate the free end of that red wire directly to the left hand lug on the output jack and you might get sound from the pickup, but the neither of the pots would do anything without making further repairs/changes to the wiring that's currently there.

I'd probably steer away from mineral oil. The term itself is fairly broad and can be used to describe things like paraffin oil or baby oil, neither of which I'd want anywhere near timber products. Your best bet is to get something specifically designed to be used with timber as a conditioning agent. Furniture oils and polishes (provided they are silicone-free) should be fairly easy to find that will work just fine on a fretboard. Even foodsafe oils for chopping boards and the like are probably OK.

Any reason why you don't want to use a standard flip-open battery compartment? Should be farily trivial to cut a small rectangle on the back somewhere out of the way.

I agree. On first glance I can't see an issue with the fretboard that would warrant total removal and replacement. Some closeups of the damage would help. Fretboard removal isn't a trivial job, particularly on an acoustic instrument where there are plenty of fragile components nearby (binding, top, finish, braces etc) that have the potential of being damaged along the way. Should a fretboard replacement be required however, ideally you'd replace the fretboard with one of the same scale length and dimensions. This minimises the amount of extra work required in re-locating and gluing the bridge and/or reshaping the fretboard to match the existing neck and/or reshaping the existing neck to match the new fretboard. Depending on your circumstances (money, tools, skills, value of instrument, access to professional help, availability of a ready-made one etc) this may help steer your decision as to whether to repair what's already there or scrap the existing one.

Can you not measure what is already still left attached to the top and use that as a reference, or has the bridge been removed before and re-glued in the wrong position? The normal way to place a new bridge would be to measure along the treble side of the neck from nut to 12th fret and double this distance. You could potentially add perhaps 2mm to this distance to give yourself a little more leeway to approximate better intonation. The leading edge of the treble-side of the saddle goes at this point. The rest of the bridge still needs to be placed perpendicular to the centreline of the neck, and centrally located to ensure the outer strings don't start diving off the sides of the neck. The angled saddle should assist with guaranteeing intonation is correct across all six strings, provided the high-E is placed at the nut-to-12-fret-times-two distance (plus a hair), provided the rest of the bridge is positioned squarely on the top relative to the centreline of the neck. Not sure what you mean here. You'll have to provide us with a picture of what you're describing.

Not all photos. Just really old ones. Any threads that use external hosting services to hold the pictures are at the mercy of whether those hosting services are still live. Village Photos is long gone, taking any hosted images with it.

That should get you close. Gotcha's: The push/pull switch component is shown on the volume pot, but it should just be a simple case of moving this "block" to the back of the tone pot. Wiring colours shown on the humbucker are for a Seymour Duncan pickup. If using a pickup with a different wiring standard you'll have to adapt accordingly. The diagram assumes you're installing it in a Telecaster using the traditional Tele-style 3-way switch. If you're using a different kind of pickup selector (Gibson toggle, mini toggle, rotary switch etc) there will be some wiring transposition involved.

Strictly speaking you use all five templates in the PDF file I linked to, but the two critical ones are on pages 2 and 3. Read the full article regarding those templates here before you start routing. The half-inch discrepancy you originally observed may well be correct for the particular bridge used in those plans you linked to. In the template drawings I linked to the trem studs are 10mm closer to the nut than the scale length point, which is only 2.5mm shorter than what you found. The complicating factor is that you need to account for any differences in the way your own bridge is constructed with respect to the position of the trem posts relative to the forward position of the saddles. I outlined a method for roughly determining this in your previous thread.

Both of your most recent diagrams are the two main implementations of a scarf headstock joint, with the second one perhaps being the most common. Both are equally viable. The second one has the advantage of hiding the glue/join line in the back of the neck. The first version places the glue line right across the face of the headstock. If you don't use a cap to cover the face of the headstock this may be visually distracting to look at.

To be fair, that drawing doesn't explicitly indicate that the vertical line passing through the posts on the tremolo is the scale length reference line, and nor should it be. If you look at where the saddles are positioned compared to the studs, the last point of contact the strings make with the saddles is a bit further back from that vertical line. The stud line will be a bit closer to the nut. Have you tried using the template drawings provided here on ProjectGuitar? http://www.projectguitar.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=2303 It's for a recessed genuine Floyd Rose, so you'd have to make some adaptions to your own situation if you're using a different bridge, but the diagram on page 2 shows the amount of extra distance between the scale length line and the relative position of the two trem posts.

Got a link to the template we can have a look at?

The volume pots act as a variable voltage divider. You can look at them as being able to variably 'select' the full output of the pickup (ie max volume), ground (ie dead silence) or anything in between the two extremes. If one side isn't grounded then turning the pot all the way to zero doesn't alow the wiper lug to head towards the 'dead silence' lug, and the volume control just doesn't work. You might get some reduction in volume and an increasing amount of darkening of the tone, but you'll never be able to achieve volume at zero. The problem with some of the wiring still remains, even if you reverse the labelling on that switch. When in the re-labelled blend mode for example, the signal from the neck pickup doesn't make it past the blend pot. The switching around the bridge and neck pickup tone controls on the 'neck/bridge' switch seems needlessly complicated which makes tracing it out pretty challenging, and may also be contributing to the problem by adding more chances of errors creeping into the circuit. Unlikely. You'd need thousands of metres of wiring before such a massive loss in volume would become apparent. When you say 'measurable resistance' when probing between jack and pickup, how much are you seeing? How are you taking this measurement (ie, where are you attaching your meter probes to)?

Is the blade on with the teeth pointing upwards instead of downwards?

The diagram provided in the EMG instructions shows how it's done with a 3-way switch (diagram 10, page 4). Diagram 4 on page 2 also shows the basic wiring layout of the volume pot when required to be configured as a master volume with the push-pul coil selection on the 89, which is what you need in your case. It should be relatively straightforward to use this as a basis to adapt to a 5-way switch installation.

Nice work Your tolex job looks neater than the last one I did. I re-covered a seriously brutalised Leslie 18 rotary speaker some time ago. Much swearing and sticking myself to things was involved. I've often wondered why ported speaker enclosures never really took off for guitarists. Seems a good way to boost the bass response of smaller cabs to give them an edge when competing against the big ol' 4x12.

Unfortunately your wiring scheme is not going to work as drawn. On first glance: Volume pots are not grounded. Without a ground on each lug they will not operate correctly. There's also no ground shown on the output jack which is also mandatory for getting sound out of the guitar (could be the main reason why you have no sound at this stage) There's only one pot value indicated (250) which I assume is meant to be 250K for all pots? Which pots control what functions? Some are ambiguous as to what they are meant to do. Capacitor values as indicated (0.22uF, 0.33uF, 0.1uF, 0.47uF) seem unusually large. I'd expect them to be an order of magnitude smaller, ie 0.022uF, 0.033uF, 0.01uF, 0.047uF. When the pickups are in "split" mode, the neck pickup cannot be selected as it is routed through a grey wire to a resistor (lower-right of diagram, underneath one of the pots) which goes nowhere. The bridge pickup also becomes the default pickup going to the output in "split" mode (the neck/bridge pickup selector has no effect) It's a pretty complicated looking scheme. It may be easier to fault find if it's broken down into blocks to try and establish what functions you want and how best to implement them.