curtisa

No, it's definitely in error. The diagram crosses up the red/white pairs of wires from both pickups on the switch. Note that the drawn orientation of the pickup is important to making this work as described (ignoring the red/white mixup). Tapping inner/outer coil pairs requires that the pickups are oriented with the slugs away from each other. This may cause unexpected surprises if the pickups you're using only have twelve identical-looking pole pieces, or if you try to mix and match pickups with different winding standards. Relying on the "look" of the pickup may leave you tapping the upper/lower coils rather than the inner/outer coils. That one will work fine. Adding a second "column" to the switch and copying the terminations for a second pickup will also fix the first diagram, although the vagueness surrounding the pickup orientation still remains. The switch works by "dragging the midpoint" of the two coils up and down. Using the hover-over diagram on that website, in position 1 the red/white tap point gets dragged up to the hot lead, which connects the midpoint to the output and shorts out the north coil, leaving only the south coil active. In position 3 the midpoint gets dragged down to ground, shorting out the south coil and leaving the north coil active. In position 2 the midpoint gets returned to an unconnected state and both coils are working as per a normal humbucker. Another way to look at it is to imagine a slinky being suspended above the ground. The top is held in your right hand while the bottom touching the floor. Grabbing hold of the middle of the slinky in your left hand, imagine lowering the slinky towards the floor while maintaining the same relative distance between your left and right hands. The middle of the slinky being held in your left will eventually meet the floor while the remainder of the slinky held in your right ends up being half as high off the ground. The half-length of slinky held in your left hand now has a length of zero, while the half-length of slinky held in your right has remained constant. Going in the other direction, hold the slinky as it was originally, leave your left hand steady gripping the middle and lower the top of the slinky being held your right hand until it meets your left. The slinky is once again half as high off the ground, but the two half-lengths of slinky being held in each of your hands have swapped over.

Nice one, Baldrick

Please tell me this isn't where you find out Matt's pickups are slightly different than 'standard' humbucker dimensions

Yep, spot on

Things I can see: Unless you are relying on some kind of conductive layer on the inside of the control cavity to act as your ground connection to various parts of the wiring (eg, copper tape shielding), the tone pot case requires a dedicated connection to ground. With the black wire on the tone pot connected to the righthand lug, clockwise rotation = reducing treble. Swap the black wire on the righthand lug of the tone pot to the left lug if you want the more conventional anticlockwise rotation = reducing treble operation The blue wire from the bottom of the chain of mini toggles needs to go to the righthand lug on the volume pot. You'll end up with two wires there where it also connects to the black link to the tone pot. The middle lug on the volume pot goes to the tip connection of the output jack and out to your amp of choice. Once the output jack is in place, all grounds in the scheme will need to be connected to the sleeve/ring connection of the output jack. How you make all these ground connections marry up is entirely up to you, but I will say that your decision to use that big, chunky exposed copper link makes a good, easy-to-solder connection point for this purpose.

Either of @mistermikev's switch diagrams would actually work, although the one marked with the arrow is more likely to be the type you'll be able to buy, and is probably more likely to be the one used in the diagram. At either extreme of operation, the mini toggle just behaves as a regular phase reverse switch. In the middle position the mini toggle shorts the pickup signal out (connects the two pickup leads together) and bypasses it. This differs from a pickups-in-parallel situation where you want to disconnect the pickup to remove its contribution from the output. Think of the three pickups in series as three people passing a bucket of water down the chain. The bucket needs to go from the top of the chain to the bottom. With all three people (pickups) present the bucket just passes from top to bottom, from person to person. If one person is missing (a pickup is bypassed), the bucket just needs to jump over the spot where the person is missing in order to continue down the chain. I guess the analogy of the phase reverse position will be that one of the people on the bucket chain turns around 180 degrees, and instead of receiving a bucket in his left hand and passing it on with his right, he receives the bucket with his right and passes it with his left. The two tone controls are...interesting. I assume PTB stands for "Passive Treble and Bass". The lower pot acts as a variable bass cut, whereas the upper of the two is the more traditional treble cut/tone pot you'd find in most any guitar, although as drawn there is a ground missing from the case of the upper pot.

Is that your diagram or someone else's? As far as I can see that is series on/off switching with phase flips on each pickup, and should already satisfy your three requirements.

Ah, yes! Well spotted. And it will even work with the E-megaswitch that the OP is wanting to use.

If you have any maple left over from the neck what could be interesting is to do @Bizman62's suggested re-shaping of the neck taper, and glue on maple to the edges of the fretboard and neck sides to get the overall neck width back to the intended dimensions. Once shaped and finished it would look like the rosewood fretboard was sitting in a 'tray' of maple, with the maple wrapping around the edges of the rosewood. And you'd get bound/blind fret slots to boot.

That could be an issue then. Putting the pickup selector switch downstream of the neck selector means that the neck switch needs the same number of 'poles' as the number of pickups in a neck. Each pole allows the selection of a pickup on the upper neck and its corresponding pickup on the lower neck to be passed to the selector switch for subsequent combining. The idea is that the pickup selector, instead of selecting a combination of pickups, selects a combination of pickups per neck. So instead of having a 5-way switch do bridge/bridge+mid/mid/mid+neck/neck, it does bridge (from neck 1 or 2)/bridge+mid (from neck 1 or 2)/mid (from neck 1 or 2) etc... Three pickups in a typical Strat requires three poles on the neck selector switch, but I think you're going to struggle finding a push-pull pot with more than two poles on the switching element. Possible alternatives: Reduce the number of pickups in each neck to two instead of three. Use a different style of switch as the neck selector. A rotary switch should be available with three or more poles and mini toggles can be bought with up to four poles. Have a 5-way pickup selector for each neck. The push-pull then only needs to select the output of the upper 5-way pickup selector or the lower, which only requires a single pole on the push-pull to achieve. The are other ways of achieving your original switching requirement, but they involve installing batteries and relays which I assume will be over-complicating the build too much.

Provided you don't have a need for a "both necks at once" option, then yes. A push-pull pot will work perfectly as a "one or the other" switch that is independent of the pot element itself. Pickup selection across each neck will be the only limiting factor - ie, how many pickups per neck, and do you want one pickup selector per neck or one pickup selector for the whole guitar?

Not meaning to thrash the issue (@komodo's right - we're only looking out for you), but double-check your measurements here. 1.89" at the 12th seems a bit skinny. Unless you're using a significantly narrower-than-normal bridge there's a risk the strings might start sailing off the edges of the fretboard near the body. My brain don't do imperial measurements too well, but assuming a narrow Fender-style bridge with 10.5mm string spacing, 3mm fretboard overhang on the outer strings and a rough guestimate of 7.3mm string spacing at the nut (subsequent nut width = 43.2mm) , I'd expect the 12th fret to be a bit over 51mm (or 2.02" if you prefer).

I don't think there is any hard or fast policy regarding the number of likes a member can give as such. More correctly, they're known as 'reactions' in the forum software, as they include all the possible clicky icons you can give to another member's posts (like/haha/confused/sad/thanks). The current limits are assigned based on each membership group. Your membership group is identified by that little text label immediately under your avatar. Your advancement through each membership group occurs automatically based on your content count: New Members are allowed 3 reactions per day Members are allowed 10 reactions per day Established Members are allowed 50 reactions per day Veteran Members are allowed 5 reactions per day (??) That last one is obviously a glitch, so I've just bumped it up to 200. This would explain why a number of you are starting to run into the limit prematurely. My apologies for not spotting this sooner. As for why the limits are what they are, I actually couldn't tell you. For all I know they're just the default levels applied when the forum software was upgraded to include reaction functionality, which would have occurred well before my time. @Prostheta may have a better understanding behind these settings. More pragmatically, I can take a guess and suggest the reason behind the sliding scale of permissible reactions is that it encourages new users to get into the habit of interacting with others in conversation, rather than making a handful of posts and just smashing the 'like' button all the time.

Takes me back to the bad old days of doing my own PCBs. I could never get 100% perfect results with Press 'n Peel Blue. I usually ended up going over the transferred design with a Dalo pen before etching due to some part of the transfer not taking properly. Ammonium Persulphate crystals dissolved in warm water was what I used to use, gently rocking the tank as it went. Agitating the solution massively sped up etching time. With my designs gradually becoming more complex and the price of one-off prototype PCBs from China falling so much I eventually abandoned home etching altogether. Have you tried sending your PCB designs off to some of the fab houses yourself?

Must be a regional thing; I haven't heard of a Carnaby either. Down here we just call them Black Cockatoos or Black Cockies, although ours are a different subspecies that have yellow patches rather than the white of the Carnaby. Honky Nut = just known as a gum nut here, ie the 'nut' of a gum (eucalyptus) tree. I dunno if the Carnaby is the same, but our Black Cockies are actually gentler than more well-known Sulphur Crested White Cockatoo. Their call is quite polite and they tend to just perch in trees and 'talk' to each other. Urban myth has it that you only see flocks of Black Cockies flying overhead ahead of approaching stormy weather. The SCW Cockatoos, in contrast have a raucous screech that sounds not unlike Hollywood representations of flying Pterodactyl dinosaurs, and they aren't afraid to tear up the bark of tree branches in search of insects, making a huge mess in the process. Thread derailment complete, carry on...

All you need now is to devise a way of animating it the same way as those film clips and you could retire on the royalties from the technology..

I think that top should be called 'Jupiter Stormclouds'.

The black gaffa tape definitely has a certain charm about it - I like it! Gives the guitar finish an almost roadworn, patchwork black denim look. Gaffa binding is a stroke of ghetto genius too. At the very least, if you accidentally drop the guitar it will bounce

Divide and conquer. Fret buzz can be down to a lot of different factors, so while the information out there about how to combat it may seem overwhelming, the only real approach is to investigate as many of the proposed solutions and strike off the ones that lead you nowhere until you're left with the most successful outcome. Some possible causes can be a neck with not enough relief (curvature), a backbow (curved the wrong way) a warp or twist, high fret(s), excessively worn frets, action too low at the bridge or nut, the particulars of your playing style... While the primary reason why the strings are buzzing is likely to be that they're striking the frets while they're vibrating, there could be other things that could cause an issue. Consider other secondary sources of buzz such as a pickup set too close to the strings, a nut slot or saddle where the string rubs laterally across a flat spot generating a sitar-like buzz, or even something unrelated that's buzzing sympathetically such as a loose tuner or strap button. The key is working out where the source of the buzz lies. Once that is established you can then work out a strategy to combat it.

The 'profeshunnul' way would be to make a template from MDF and then route the shape using a 45 degree pattern bit in a table router. The original pickguard could even be used as the master template for the MDF pattern. The 'really profeshunnul' way would be to ask someone to CNC one for you direct into the pickguard blank. The low cost way would probably involve a lot of painstaking hand-cutting and sanding. The 45 degree bevel typically applied to the outer edges will still be a challenge to execute with anything other than a router though.

You'd surely want to use an old Stryper LP as the scratch plate on such a build?

Probably a good choice given your earlier comments about limiting your potential impact on the NHS should things go wrong. Carbon fibre dust from cutting/shaping is not pleasant to deal with. You could always go for the ghetto approach to a pickguard - what about cutting a sidewall from a big black plastic tub from the hardware store?

Work continues at a snails pace. The string lock assembly needs to sit a bit lower on the headstock to provide the strings a chance to deflect downwards after clearing the zero fret, so the mounting plate gets recessed into the headplate immediately behind the nut ledge: The hair-thin film of dried Titebond over the trussrod route that the CNC machining reveals is a nice touch : The strings also need a bit of clearance underneath them as they head downhill from the nut to the string locks, so a gentle bit of manipulation of the end of the fretboard is required, The ramp is just added with the use of a small chisel and a bit of finessing with sandpaper: Then it's time to give the string lock adapter plate a quick assemble to see how everything lines up: Note also the installation of the zero fret and nut. I had to stone away the barbs on the fret tang a bit so that the fret was only a firm press fit into the slot. If it had been just a regular fret hammered in it would have likely split the thin piece of timber between it and the nut as it squeezed into the slot. The beauty of using a zero fret is that the nut only has to set the string spacing. String height is governed by the zero fret itself, so I can be as rough as guts with cutting the nut slots - they just need to be deep enough to allow the string to head in a downward trajectory after clearing the crown of the zero fret. In the spirit of the cheap(ish) nature of this build, the nut here is just a cheap plastic pre-cut nut from Aliexpress that cost all of about 75 cents. The slots already cut into the nut just serve as markers for where I need to start filing away hammer and tongs to deepen them enough to just guide the strings down over the zero fret. Then it's time to do my least favourite operation of this whole guitar making malarkey - crowning and polishing. The only enjoyable aspect of this I find is peeling off the tape at the end : Here's something unexpected I hadn't planned for that took me completely by surprise. After the above point I figured it would be a good idea to quickly string it up to see how everything aligned and sat. The problem I came up against was that I could only just get the floating headless trem to balance, even with all 5 springs installed and the trem claw maxed out. Measuring the length of the springs and the amount of stretch they were under compared to another Floyd Rose install I have here revealed no obvious discrepancies that I could account for. The difference with a headless trem (that I hadn't accounted for) is that the string anchoring point in the saddle is a lot further back than a Floyd or traditional Strat-type tremolo. In a Floyd/Strat the leveraging point of the string is pretty much right at the saddle. In a headless trem the string ball end sits inside the tuner screw assembly 2 or more inches further back from the saddle. Consequently the extra horizontal length behind the saddle allows the string to exert more levering force on the trem to counteract the springs, and thus requires more tension in the springs to pull the trem back to equilibrium. The upshot of this rather annoying discovery is that I've had to extend the tremolo spring cavity another 20mm closer to the neck to get me more stretch on the springs. It will look fine once finished and a cover installed, but it's a frustrating setback nonetheless: Which unfortunately means this thing is now scrap as well, as it is now 20mm too short:

If the bridge pickup route is much like as it appears near the neck pocket (ie, an oversized swimming pool cavity) it will present a problem mounting the two tremolo posts for the Floyd, as there won't be enough meat left in front of the posts to prevent them collapsing forward under the combined tension of the strings. Blocking up the bridge pickup cavity and rerouting it to leave as much timber in front of the trem posts as possible will likely be mandatory. Also factor in shimming/angling the neck in the pocket to account for the much taller bridge height than the standard Fender-style trem that's on there now.

I had a Yamaha Pacifica 721 many years ago that developed a sitar buzz on the high E. Like you, it was the saddle that was causing it. The 721 was the lower-end version of the more premium 9xx and 14xx series, and the double-locking tremolo fitted to it was also a correspondingly lower-spec unit. The plating and/or casting was probably suspect on the more basic guitar, and it eventually developed a flat spot on the break point of the high E saddle.