Pickguard

Today was my birthday, and Mrs. Stratoh4x0r gave me a canvas painted in the shape of a pickguard, to use in my project.  I'd bought a cool clear plexiglass pickguard from stewmac, and she did a  great undersea theme which fits beautifully, or anyway fit beautifully after some fiddling.

And here it is!  I ordered an aluminum pickguard shield from GFS to put between the canvas and the body.  This is good for shielding yada, yada, but will also help to keep the canvas nice and flat. I also ordered some stuff from allparts

• Black pickup covers
• Mint green knobs and switch cap
• Black screws
• Green switch cap (as an alternative to the mint green)

The Mystery of the Two Lines


But what are those two mysterious lines on the left of the body?  Foreshadowing.  I was starting to look at how the neck fits.  The strat-talk thread I mentioned earlier has a suggestion that one put in the neck for fit, then install fishing line in place of the E strings to ensure the strings are in the right place on the neck.

The suspense is palpable ... so let me tell you that the neck seems to be lining up fine.  One thing I found troubling is this: I measured the distance from the 12th fret to the saddle, with the saddle as close to the nut as possible.  I'd expected to get a little less than 12.75 inches, half of 25.5, which is the scale length of a strat.   But it was longer - not by a lot by definitely longer.  I'll have to look in to this, though my American Standard seems to be this way too, so I guess it's ok.

I don't know when I'll get to install the neck, but I hope it's before next weekend.

The New Phone Book's Here!

I've been twiddling my thumbs waiting for my Sperzel tuners to arrive, and using the intervening time to think about how to install them.  My wife was very amused to find a page in our printer that started "I love my sperzels".  She accused me of having written it, but it was in fact some instructions on how to install Sperzels.

I ended up buying them from "pottbelly2000", a.k.a. Ken Harper,  a very nice guy who gave me some advice on how to install them and shipped them out the next day.  It was also a pretty good deal, unless they turn out to be counterfeits.  The people I've encountered thus far have been uniformly nice - the guy who sold me the guitar, Stephen at CEG Hardtails from whom I bought the neck, and now Ken.  And the people on the boards are also nice and funny.  It's a bit different from the "computer guy" subculture I'm used to in which people can also be nice, but not uniformly so.

Here's a post on strat-talk that has information I'll use to install the neck.  There's also a nice tutorial here.  But first I have to install the tuners.  I was dreading this, but it worked out well.


First I drew two parallel lines using a metal rules, the top one "kissing" (or "osculating" as old-time mathematicians used to say) the tops of the pre-drilled holes, the bottom one kissing the bottoms of the holes. I then used my caliper to draw two dots at the midpoints of the lines, then drew a line joining.  So then I knew that the holes for the guide pins for the tuners had to lie on that line.






Then I used the cardboard template that came with the tuners to place the hole, and ended up with 6 nice neat holes.











And here's the result. Not bad!

Neck!

My mighty mite neck arrived today, just as promised!  It looks great, but ... in order to install the tuners I have, I have to somehow drill 6 sets of 2 holds to accommodate the pins at the back of the the tuners.  Yikes.  To do this "right", I'd have to buy a jig from stewmac for $36, and I don't want to do that. And to make matters worse, I need a #38 drill bit, which seems to be a weird size.

Also, there are no holes in the back of the next to attach it to the body.  This is getting scary.  I had wanted to avoid anything having to do with woodworking in this project.   And any time I ask about it on one of the guitar forums (fora?), someone invariably says "Don't try this without a drill press".  Rats.  It also seems as though I could really do some damage to the neck if I do it wrong.  OTOH, I really don't want to take it in to a shop and have someone do it for me.

Perhaps the me of the past was fooling the me of  now (if so, curse you, me of the past) into thinking this would be easier than it really will be, in an attempt to get me to go through with the project.  I realized there's a definite sequence I need to follow.  In order to install the neck, I need to put it in place and put strings (or fishing line) in the two E strings in order to get it positioned right.  To do that I obviously need the tuning pegs and bridge in place.

The Bridge Doesn't Fit!


To be precise, it bumps up against the side of the pickguard, which I think was installed a little off.  I removed the pickguard, and filed off some of the bridge part with a Dremel Moto-Tool, then trimmed a bit with an x-acto knife.  This made me freel incredibly cool, and after that the bridge didn't hit the pickguard any more.

Then I noticed that the holes didn't line up quite right, though the spacing was ok.  So I dremeled off a bit of the wood on one side of the hole and now it fits perfectly.  I feel even better about myself now, and the bridge is in.  Huge progress.

Installing the Tuners

I put some painter's tape on the back of the neck near the two "E" tuners.  I was going to press the tuners into the back of the tape to create an imprint for drilling holes. But I was horribly foiled when I found that the tuners I had been saving for 15 years were evidently not from my old strat, because there were 3 left and 3 right tuners!  I am quite sure that I got these back from Sadowsky when they installed Sperzels on my strat, so I guess they gave me the wrong old set?  OK, it's most likely my error, but I can't see how, since I have only one electric that doesn't have 6 inline, and that came with Sperzels.  Hmm, maybe I had tuners replaced on an acoustic once?

So I have to buy some tuners, and as a corollary, I have to wait for them.  I found a guy on ebay selling Sperzel staggered tuners that will fit for a pretty decent price and have emailed him, etc, etc.

Goodies Arrive in the Mail

I returned home from a trip and found two boxes of goodies, one from Acme Guitar Works, the other from Guitar Fetish.  The latter contained my new trem, which was promised to be a drop-in replacement for the one in my bullet.  This proved to be true, but only because it's a genuine cobocaster which has a thicker body.  However ... the bridge doesn't quite drop in because the pickguard is in the way.  I think it wasn't placed exactly right on the body, so now I have to cut a little bit off the pickguard.  I'll probably be impatient and do this with a dremel rather than file it patiently.

With any luck, my neck will arrive tomorrow and I can start to reassemble this thing.

The package from Acme contained two pots and some nice wire.  The pots are a blender pot and a push/pull pot.  I have some not quite fully baked ideas about how I want to wire it up. I've been reading a lot - articles online, plus a book by T.A. Swike.  The book has many good points, but as the Amazon reviewers point out, is printed in black & white, is short on theory (around 100% short), and needs editing.  Oddly, the book gives a link to a freely available color PDF of the text.  Even more oddly, he's selling it for $14.95 on lulu.com: http://stores.lulu.com/snotboards - yes, that says "snotboards". It seems like T.A. is trying to figure out the best way to to do electronic publishing and is trying many things.  His main thing seems to be skateboards. In any event, it did help me understand quite a bit, so that's good.

Wiring Plans

I don't use the controls on my guitar very much.  I'm always impressed when I see people fiddling with the controls in the middle of a solo, as though they're thinking "ok, this is the part where I need more treble, now to add a bit of volume,...".   I'm not good enough to handle the disruption to playing this causes, and really I just need a volume control I suppose.  However that's not much fun. So as of now, I'm thinking of doing this:

• Regular volume control
• First tone control is the single tone control for all pickups.  It uses a push/pull pot which, when "pulled", bypasses both the volume and tone pots, giving a boost.  It might sound terrible of course ... we'll see.
• Second tone control is a blender pot which impacts which pickups are included in the output; a good description is on the Acme Guitar Works site.  Essentially, when turned to "10" it has no effect.  As it is rotated counterclockwise, it mixes in another pickup, depending on which pickups are selected with the 5-way switch.  There's a thread on strat-talk that might be useful for understanding how it works.
• Neck and 2nd Position - blends in bridge pickup
• 3rd Position - no effect
• 4th and Bridge Position - blends in neck pickup

In Which I Buy A Neck

I haven't been very good about writing updates.  Then again, since my readership is limited (hi Mom!) perhaps it's not so bad.

I've been thinking about wiring, shielding, necks and bridges.  The neck on this thing is just so terrible, I feel I've got to replace it right away. I removed the neck and did some measurements using the caliper I mentioned before, and my handy something-or-other tool that I bought from the Stewart MacDonald catalog.  There's a great set of pictures on the Warmoth site that shows all sorts of dimensions, for example:

So I took of the neck and checked lots of measurements.  It seems to be quite standard, so that's a relief.  I started looking around for a good neck to get. Somehow I don't feel ready to drop $300 on a really great neck, and I decided to spend just around $100. Mighty Mite started to look mighty attractive.

Mighty Mite seems to be  a wholesaler that makes a range of necks of pretty good quality in a number of different configurations.  A regular human such as I doesn't buy from them; instead their market is guitar builders.  You owe it to yourself to look at the Mighty Mite web site - trés classy, sans doute.   There's also a swell picture on their necks page,  but I was very disappointed in the body page.  No picture, and a huge missed opportunity for double entendres.

It seems that some people just buy a bunch of necks from them and re-sell them on ebay.  Since the necks are meant to be a starting point in a build, they seem not always to be well finished (e.g. frets leveled) and some people complain about them.  Also, they come stock with a crappy plastic nut.  I've seen lots of people saying "When I got it, lots of things were bad.  I did x,y,z to this neck and now it's the greatest neck in the universe".   Unfortunately, I'm still working on a,b and c, so x, y and certainly z, are beyond me.   For a while it looked as though I would end up getting something from Warmoth for this reason.

After some searching, I came across an ebay seller, CEG Hardtails, who seems to buy these necks fix them up, and resell them.   Mr. CEG Hardtails, also known as Stephen, turns out to be a nice guy and very responsive to my questions.  I was looking for an all maple neck, compound radius, with a decent nut, and he had just the thing for $135 including shipping.   It was an interesting interaction, and another example of the goodness of buying things over the internet, if one is careful.  Actually I should wait a bit to congratulate myself - as it now stands, I've paypaled $135 to him, and haven't received the neck yet.  But I do have a good feeling about the transaction, and in the end, isn't that what really matters?  

Tuners

Most necks will come with holes pre-drilled for tuning pegs.  The sizes of these holes are sometimes quoted in inches, sometimes in millimeters.  So one sees 3/4 inch, 10mm, and even something as precise as 9.98mm   Hmm, I wonder if tuners sold to fit 10mm will fit a 9.98mm neck? My Mighty Mite is listed as "3/8 inch (10mm)".  Not to be picky, but (3/8)*25.4 = 9.525, which is as equal to 9.98 as Notlob is to Bolton.  I have the tuners I took off my American Standard Strat when I had Sperzels installed, and I think they'll fit.  Ultimately I'll probably want something better, but these are probably not too bad.

Bridge

The bridge is also pretty crappy. Last night I disassembled the guitar, removing the neck and bridge.  I also popped off the pickguard to look at the pickups and wiring.  Very small pots, for one thing.  However this thing really didn't sound too bad when I plugged it in.  Also, I'm taking some time to think about wiring experiments I want to try (more to come).  Back to the bridge.  I weighed it on our postal scale and it was around 5 ounces, just about half the weight of a Fender american standard.   I can believe that replacing this thing will make a big difference.   I had said I wanted to get a Callaham bridge, but decided to start out with a Guitar Fetish "drop in" replacement.   I ordered that bridge and some other goodies, but I can't remember what - maybe some pots.

Electronics

This has been the most fun so far.  I've been reading a lot, and I'm actually starting to grok guitar wiring, at least in the sense in which someone ignorant of electricity and circuits can grok such a subject.  I've got a number of ideas of things to try, and I ordered a blender pot and a push/pull pot from Acme Guitarworks.  I'm thinking of setting up the first tone control as a "volume boost" push/pull, so that a pull sends the pickup output directly to the jack, without going through the volume pot.  The blender would be in place of the second tone control, and do the standard blending thing, i.e. mix in the bridge or neck pickup as appropriate.

At the same time, I've been reading the guitar nuts site, and in particular his article about shielding and rewiring.  It's amusing reading, and seems to make sense. However I don't know how much I want to bite off at first.  Going with his setup requires me to abandon just copying standard wiring diagrams, and will probably make it harder to communicate with others for wiring advice.  So it will likely be a later step.  Actually, if I go with noiseless pickups, like the Fender Hot Noiseless, it may be a non-issue.  I realize doing that is kind of uncool to a strat purist.  But I don't quite get it.  For example a guy like Oz Noy who plays through 8 zillion effects -- does he really need or get an authentic "strat tone"?

Bridges

I spent a little time figuring out which Callaham bridge I'd need to get. The cobocaster has a "vintage" bridge with 6 screws, and that's fine with me. However ... there are various sizes, which seem to depend largely on the spacing between various screws and the "string spacing" - the spacing between the high and low E strings, when measured from center to center. Luckily, I already have a nice digital caliper which I bought from the fine people at MAX Tool, a cool online store that sells tools (though one would never guess this from its odd name).

I like measuring things. Now I know that my right index finger is 0.608 inches wide at the first knuckle.   It reminds me of this article in yesterday's Times magazine, entitled The Data-Driven Life. The article seems to be about how people these days are able (and willing) to measure and record their lives using gadgets like the fitbit. I say "seems" because I can't be bothered reading it.  I assume it says that lots of people are doing this, and they have a false sense of something or other, and so on.  Articles in the Times magazine used to be really long and good.  Now they are really short and not as good.

But I do like measuring things.  I plan to weigh each component on a postal scale prior to installing it so I can know exactly what the contribution is to the total weight of the guitar.  Why?  Perhaps I'd know if I were to read that recent article in the Times. Oh well.

I was thinking of taking the guitar to Evan Gluck,  a wonderful guitar tech in New York City, so that he could get it to be as good as it can be, thereby establishing a baseline.  However, the setup costs around the same as I paid for the guitar, and more importantly seems to go against the spirit of the project.  If  I'm about to swap out the bridge, why pay to have it adjusted, intonated, etc? So I'm not doing that.

Back to bridges ... I mentioned "string spacing" above - time to measure it.  First I want to note that my use of quotes is not intended to be ironic.  I have nothing but respect for the concept of string spacing, and acknowledge its validity as a measurement.  To measure it, I used my caliper to get the distance from the outside of the low E to the outside of the high E, which is 2.106.  Doing it this way means that I am getting extra distance equal to one radius of the low E, and one of the high E.  These radii are 0.046/2 and 0.01/2 inches, so the total extra in my measurement is 0.023 + 0.005 = 0.028 inches. So, the string spacing is

2.106 - 0.028 = 2.078

which probably means the real answer is  2 1/16 = 2.0625.   The other parameter is "mounting spacing", another measurement deserving of respect, and defined as the distance from the center of screw #1 to the center of screw #6.  From visual inspection, this is the same as string spacing for this guitar.

And the winner is - the Callaham Limited Production Narrow Strat Bridge Assembly.  

That's troubling. I think it means that I would be stuck with this somewhat odd size bridge, making it hard to just buy a body off ebay   - any decent pre-drilled body will either be "vintage" or "modern" (2 screw), and not have these specs.

A helpful guy on squier-talk.com pointed out to me that I could just buy a replacement bridge from guitarfetish for $35.  Maybe I should do that, and plan to replace the bridge when I replace the body.  What I don't understand yet is whether having a different spacing has an impact on the nut, that is if I were using a neck with a narrow bridge, would that same neck work ok with a regular 2 7/32 inch bridge?  In case you thought this blog wasn't going to get exciting, I think we've now refuted that definitively.  I'm going to end on this note ... stay tuned!