Finally Done!

I essentially did what I planned, though it took a few tries and I ended up drilling out one of the holes and replacing with a dowel a few times :-( Very painful. However I finally have the guitar together and that stupid Trem King is but a painful memory. As always, it was a big learning experience and I emerged knowing a lot more about how to install this trem, and also how to set it up. Just so I don't forget, I want to record a few things about that.

• The "blade" should be parallel to the guitar body.  To get it right, install the bridge with springs, string up and tune up. If it's not parallel to the body, tighten or loosen the springs a little, then retune and see how it looks.  Repeat as needed
• String height is adjusted using only the two posts, not the saddle heights. Remember that they have internal locks that are opened/closed using a small hex wrench inserted from the top.  The warmoth site has a nice illustration of this.

 

• Adjust the saddles so they are at their lowest position.  Then raise B, A a bit higher than the E and G, D a bit higher than the B,A, so  as to match the neck's curvature.  It's really a little bit! I calculated that for a 16 inch  neck (which is the final radius of the Warmoth compound) that the differences are around 1/64 inch!
• Now adjust the height of the posts so that the strings are the height you want above the fretboard
• Hmm, at some point we have to check the neck and adjust relief to taste
• The bar has female threads, so screw it in.  It doesn't seem necessary to tighten the screw to keep the bar functioning nicely.

Planning the Installation

1. Lay straight edge along neck, draw line on tape on body near bridge hole
2. Measure 12 15/32 " from bottom of 12th fret and mark.
3. Join points (2) with a straight line; check distances from 12th fret along line Mark midpoint between points (2) on line 3.
4. Measure left and right 27mm (per spec of VS100N).  

Drill on (5).

Tale of a Trem King

Some time ago, I decided I wanted to replace the GFS trem I'd used for my original project with a Trem King. It seemed like a great design and I'd read rave reviews from someone I respect. Since I'd always felt that the GFS was crappy, despite its working fine, I paid to have someone install it. I soon realized I'd made a huge mistake. First, I didn't like the way it felt, and second it made me feel like the guitar was less my own work. Perhaps the latter influenced the former; it's hard to say. But leaving that aside, I never liked the feeling of the Trem King. It seems very unresponsive and I can't get a nice shimmer, which is really my main use of a trem anyway. I can't remember what I was thinking at the time, but maybe I thought the Trem King would be my ticket to Jeff Beck land. Not only do I dislike the Trem King's function as a trem, but it seems the tuning stability is poor. It's really completely turned me off using that guitar, of which I had been so proud.

I found a few interesting posts on Ty Quinn's blog, Strung Out? Fret Not! Ty's first post was a review of the Trem King after installation, and the second described the process of ripping it out and putting in a nice 2-point trem. Ty was very responsive to my email, and very helpful. It's interesting to read the posts on the blog, particularly those from the Trem King guys, who were of course quite concerned by what they read. It appears they have a new version that fixes various problems, and I think it is quite likely that the one I have is the old version. Whether that's true or not, I've decided to get rid of it and replace it with a nice Gotoh/Wilkison VS100N from stewmac.

Since I had some trouble last time I installed one of these, I'm going to be extra careful, and my next post will be about how I'll measure and drill the holes for the ferrules.

Even Crappier

After a huge amount of measuring, I successfully used the Rockler thing to drill some holes, inserted the ferrules, and it looked great.

Then to my dismay, I found that one of the holes was not positioned correctly.  I could have avoided this with a simple measurement, as Mrs Caster pointed out in a nice way.  So then I tried to remove the ferrules, and cracked the body. I decided to go back to square one, and destroyed the body further when extracting the ferrules.

Very disappointing.  I ordered a replacement body from GFS (actually not quite a replacement, since I had to get Surf Green instead of Daphne Blue).  I also ordered a plexiglass template from stewmac so I don't have to worry about this again.

The biggest worry I have is whether I really had to do the hockey stick thing.  I can't quite face doing that again.  Bleh.

It's pretty clear from the picture that these aren't lined up.  I don't see what I didn't notice that before hammering in the ferrules.  The holes came out pretty nicely though.

Crap

Tonight, as part of installing the bridge, I decided to attach the neck.  And ... the holes in the neck and those in the body don't line up.  Rats.  I have to assume that the holes Rob drilled are correct, and I should probably make some changes to the body. From looking at the neck plate against the body, it seems pretty clear that the holes aren't right.    The last time this happened, it was with the Mighty Mite neck and I plugged and redrilled the neck.  But I don't want to do that on this primo Allparts neck.

I found a thread on tdpri on just this topic.   Here's the final post in the thread:

Throw a pick guard and neck pickup on first and get the lay of the land. Sometimes fixing an error is easier if you locate the error first.

If it came down to a little wood off the body... no big deal.

Drilling the neck to fix the problem is the worst thing to do. Those holes directly affect the strength of the joint. Unless you are going to use cross grained dowels and epoxy... your just making it weaker.

jspotts... you are absolutely correct. Enlarging the the holes in the body is the correct approach... these are clearance holes and have almost no influence on the strength of the joint. In so far as moving the neck plate 1/16" of an inch... who cares? As long as it's not skewed... it won't look wrong.

My bet is the pickguard will show you the body is big. 5 minutes with a Dremel or a sharp chisel (anybody remember those?) and your set.

The body holes should be drilled to 11/64" (spec)... 13/64" would be no problem at all. And if the screw threads drag on one side of the clearance hole... again no problem.

As Bolide has said... wouldn't be a bad idea to see where the bridge is sitting too...

If I do this, the challenge will be to figure out where to drill on the body.  This post, also from the same thread, seems like a good way to do it:

I had a Strat neck and body with a similar mis-match. I picked the neck as the correct one. I plugged the body holes with dowel. I cut drywall screws (coarse threads, pointy ends) to about 1/2-inch long and hand-screwed them backwards into the neck holes, so the pointy end stuck out about 1/8-inch. I fitted the neck in the pocket and pressed down. The four points marked the locations of my new body holes. Bam!

Drywall Screws

It seems that drywall screws are great.  I found a page, courtesy of Smith Fastener, with information about sizes, particularly the diameters.  I'll want a screw that doesn't enlarge the hole, but that fits snugly. According to the fine folks at Guitar Nucleus, neck screws are #8 x 1 3/4.   The Smith Fastener page says that drywall screws do come in #8.  So I guess I need #8 coarse thread drywall screws.

Next Steps

Now that the block is in place, I can install the bridge.  This is a scary part for me, as I need to figure out how to be sure the ferrules are in correctly, and once they're in, les jeux sont faits, as we swamis say.

I read a post by Ron Kirn where described his approach, which I think can be explained like this:

• Put the bridge in place, and move all the way to the left.  Draw a vertical line along the edge.
• Do the same on the right
• Push the bridge as far as possible towards the neck.  Draw a vertical line along the edge
• Do the same, pushing away from the neck

Then the idea is to center the bridge horizontally and vertically, based on the lines.  I haven't figured out the most practical way of doing this yet - I'll have to look at the bridge. How about this

• Push bridge all the way to the left, draw vertical line along edge
• Push bridge all, draw vertical line along edge
• Draw line exactly between the two
• Do the same thing but on the horizontal axis

Once I have that done, I'll attach the neck to double-check that things are lined up ok:

• Attach neck
• Put on low and high E strings loosely
• See how it looks with the bridge on the middle lines
• Measure to check scale length

Once that's ok, the big question is where to drill the holes for the ferrules.  On the horizontal axis, that's easy - it's just the midpoint of the areas where the post will touch the bridge.  Vertically, it's tougher, but I can probably do it by taking some measurements of the post when screwed into the ferrule, looking at the distance from the circumference of the ferrule to the circumference of the circle where the bridge touches the post.  How in the world did I do this last time?!

Routing and Gluing

The routing went pretty well. One problem, which I knew about in advance, is that the router won't really go deep enough.  To get around this, aside from removing the springs from the router attachment, I had to route out extra space on the left and right sides so that the chuck would fit in the space, and so the router could go deeper.  Bleh.  I would have been much better off with  a real router, but I needed something cordless (maybe I should buy a long extension cord?).

So, without further ado, here's what it looked like when done

Here it is with the wood  block glued in.  Yikes, that left side looks terrible.  It's partially due to the camera angle, but I wouldn't have had this happen if I'd had a real plunge router.  Oh well.  OTOH, the piece fit in very snugly and it's a much better job than the last one. To protect the wood, I put on a few coats of clear polyurethane.

Here's a picture from the front, with some lettering from the hockey stick still intact. The block sticks out a bit into the body but I don't think it's enough to cause any trouble.  If it is, I'll have to shave off some of it, which would be a drag.