curtisa

That depends entirely on what the colour codes of each of the pickup wires are. Each pickup manufacturer will use a different colour code for their pickups. You cannot assume that black automatically means 'connect to ground'. What brand are the new pickups?

Which is why I suspect that the neck pickup has been soldered to the switch incorrectly, and hence my suggestions to move the red+black wires. Although this is completely based on what the switch looks like in that photo and the pattern of the solder terminals on that brown plate. I'm guessing that with the way it is currently wired you probably have: Position 1 = Bridge humbucker only Position 2 = Bridge humbucker + middle Position 3 = Middle only Position 4 = Middle only Position 5 = no sound If my assumption is correct, modifying the neck pickup red+black wires as I've mentioned in my previous post should fix positions 4 and 5 and give you ... Position 4 = Middle + neck Position 5 = Neck only

I assume the guitar is currently not working correctly at the moment? You have multiple wires with the same colours, so I assume you have traced them out and are satisfied that they are going to the pickups as you've labelled them in your pictures. With the above in mind I woud have thought: The red wire on the middle-right terminal you have labelled 'neck pu' should be soldered to the upper-right terminal. The black wire on the lower-left terminal you have labelled 'neck pu' should be soldered to the nearest terminal that is ground. You could solder it to where the humbucker braid and white 'middle pu' wires are tied together. However I haven't seen a switch quite like that before, and am making a bunch of guesses as to how it works without being able to physically handle it and inspect it. I assume the terminal in the middle with the red wire is the output of the switch to the volume pot, and that it's a 5-way? Not necessarily. The coloured wires on the pickup are provided as a convenience to the person installing it, not an automatic designator of what function it serves. For all we know, the 'correct' way of wiring that particular pickup could be Black = hot/Red = ground.

Easy preventative measure for that is to make the neck blank a few inches longer than you need, drill a hole through all the lams before gluing at the extreme ends and insert a dowel through the holes like a shishkebab. Apply glue, clamp up and cut the dowelled ends off when the glue dries. You still need to choose your laminations appropriately for grain direction and orientation. I wouldn't expect a few random offcuts of timber to result in a stable neck if laminated together, just as I wouldn't expect a highly-figured single piece of maple to result in a twist-free one-piece neck. I've seen one piece maple necks relaminated and flipped into a multi-laminated neck just to maintain the \\\-|||-/// end grain pattern for additional strength. Considering this grain pattern above for a multi-species laminated neck, theres nothing stopping you using the \\\ and /// laminations ripped from a single piece of timber. The central ||| piece can be whatever contrasting timber you want (strength permitting) as long as the grain is 'more straighterer' than the others and the net pull of any distortions is nulled out by the two \\\ and /// pieces. Want a 5-piece laminated neck? Just insert two more mirrorred pieces in between. Keep going for 7/9/11 etc pieces. Add as many veneer slivers between the lams as you like - being so slim they'll have no impact on strength and are only there for cosmetic reasons.

Yes, the following morning. Wasn't the greatest feeling for 18 hours, though. Irish republic. Caught us by surprise too. It's not the sort of thing you check for when you sign for the car at the airport. To be fair, we might have received the fine, but we didn't have to pay it. The infringement was actually 'non-display of current road tax' (some special sticker thingy that goes on the windshield), a lesser offence than an untaxed vehicle. It wasn't until afterwards when the hire car company emailed us the proof of tax document that we discovered that the car had only been renewed on the day of the email, 3 months after it had expired.

Holiday most definitely billiant, thankyou. Give me another day or so to recover from the jetlag and I'll be ready to tackle anything* * - may not actually be ready to tackle anything

Holiday = amazeballs. Managed to avoid the worst of the rain. Storm Lorenzo passed over the UK while we were still in Amsterdam. The wettest we got was trying to walk from the Tower of London back to the Tube. We had worse trouble from procedural errors courtesy of third parties - Luggage lost on a 20 minute flight between Copenhagen and Bornholm (how likely is that?), and unwittingly driving around Ireland in an unregistered hire car (found out the hard way when we copped a fine for it).

Late to the party, but I must also extend my congratulations to you on completing that beautiful instrument. The fact that Matt was that pleased with the completed instrument is a testament to your skills as a builder. Oh, and tell Matt he's a bit of a showoff

Nice acquisition on the drum sander. Wish I'd bought mine much earlier than I did at the time, and you wonder how you managed for so long without one. Is the next purchase going to include a slightly more manly dust collector?

Just getting back up to speed after returning from holidays. That looks so damn good it even makes that lacquer chip look sexy Start sucking more so you can give us other guys a fighting chance

Another low-cost (more silent) option is to sand the high spot down using a similar technique as @Bizman62 shows above with the router. Replace the router and bit with a flat piece of timber/MDF/plywood, and attach (spray adhesive or double-sided tape) a piece of coarse sandpaper to it such that it rides on top of the rails and just kisses the thinnest part of the blank. Use shorter rails or raise the blank up on another piece of MDF to get the blank at the right height as required. When the sanding block rides the rails and no longer takes any more dust off the blank, you know the piece is flat. Just make sure you position your sandpaper so that it doesn't come in contact with the rails and accidentally starts wearing them down while you're sanding, otherwise you'll start going too low.

54mm is the string spacing, 56mm is the post spacing. Back atcha!

Yes I know, but a known-good drawing of the VS100N should be close enough to serve his needs, sepcifically for the location of the trem stud holes.

I've installed a Gotoh VS100N trem before, and at the time made a quick drawing of the critical dimensions: The VS100N and the unit you have should be similar enough to just drop in as a like-for-like replacement. The only two critical dimensions will be the post spacing and the distance of the posts relative to the intonation point, both of which look to be the same for the two units. The drawing in the above link has both measurements marked.

They look a lot like solid carbide PCB drills, which should really be run at very high RPM (15000+) in a CNC spindle. As others have noted you need extremely tight control of runout, plunge speeds and perpendicularity with the workpiece, otherwise you're just going to end up with 40 broken drills. There might be enough similarity in material between fibreglass reinforced copper PCB and ebony to make the drills work, but you need to up the speed a lot to pull the swarf out of the hole and plunge the bit relatively slowly. It's not the sort of thing that's likely to work well in a standard drill press. 0.04" is only a bit over 1mm. You might fare better with a standard HSS 1mm drill bit? Cutting and flute geometry will work better at lower RPM, and HSS is a bit more forgiving with flex compared to solid carbide.

But a lot of people do believe that to be the case, even when presented with examples that defy their belief that swamp ash makes a brighter guitar than alder, or that a tune-o-matic bridge has more sustain than a Floyd Rose. Can that be predicted when you have the unfinished blank on the workbench in front of you? Again, so why make the choice up front to build that guitar out of that piece of swamp ash when, as you allude to, it might not result in the finished product sounding bright and snappy due to factors outside of the influence of the wood itself? What about if you constructed a guitar out of a material that you'd never worked with before - cast bronze, plexiglass, blackheart sassafras, a reclaimed beam of unknown origin from an old warehouse where creosote was handled? Could you make an assumption on what the resultant guitar might sound like based on the material properties alone? For all we know, MDF could be the perfect material to make a guitar out of

You misread my statement in the opposite sense - I mentioned that I felt his tone was good, but he was an average player. I suppose the issue I have with claims like that, and why I approach the importance of wood/frets/paint/air pressure/[insert factor here] with a grain of salt is that it's intrinsically impossible to prove that anything makes a difference when it seems to be universally acknowledged that they're all inter-dependent and can (allegedly) amount to no difference whatsoever. And if the player themselves is acknowledged to be a significant contributor to the tonal mix, then the whole argument that 'wood/finish/frets/fretboard X = resultant Y ' becomes moot. The follow-on questions in that case could be, 'why should a Strat be made out of ash?' or 'why should I use maple in a neck?' etc (ignoring obvious structural reasons for selecting certain wood species for particular applications). My only logical conclusion to that paradox can be that we do it because we have convinced ourselves that it does make a difference and that all we're doing as builders or players is perpetuating an unprovable hypothesis when we should be focusing our attention on just building and playing a guitar. I say embrace the things you can prove to make a tangible difference to the sound, and exploit the use of novel materials and solid construction techniques for their aesthetic benefits. The rest of the instrument will simply fall into place after that.

I think what I meant was that Zappa had an outlandishly ridiculous tone to match his outlandishly ridiculous songs. That's likely an artistic decision, rather than an inability to get something that sounded 'good' out of his guitars and equipment. That said, there's definitely examples out there of adept guitarists that simply got/get a dud sound. Mike Stern is another one that cops a lot of flak for his tone, despite being completely at home on his instrument..

I'm sure we can all identify capable guitarists that have rubbish tone and vice versa. I personally think Carlos Santana has an appalling righthand picking technique and a lot of his solos are unimaginative and tend to recycle a lot of his favourite licks and tricks, but he's got a rich, creamy, silky-smooth tone. Frank Zappa was a brilliantly gifted musician and composer, but you'd be hard-pressed to call his tone astounding. Although perhaps that was deliberate on Frank's part. Allan Holdsworth had a tone that I suspect only worked for his particular style of playing and songs. You couldn't apply his tone to other styles of music without people complaining that it sounds way too honky. Kirk Hammett is more than a capable guitarist, but his tone on the early Metallica albums was abysmal. I think that's an argument that gets missed a lot in these debates. We can rant and rave all we like about how much difference the fret material makes in a Strats tone, but at the end of the day a Strat with nickel silver frets and a Strat with stainless steel frets both sound like Strats. Maybe Frank Zappa had it right when he told us to 'Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar'.

All good. I knew what you meant. The link to that Satriani video I posted pretty much demonstrates what you're saying, although I do feel that the tonal qualities we're hearing in this case are down to performance and execution, rather than the instrument itself. Can you give any specifics about how you think these differences can be quantified? Say, will an oil finish impart X and a solid paint colour impart Y on the tone? Not trying to be difficult, just genuinely interested in your opinion here.