The last one is important because the current one says Squier on it. I'm wondering if the GFS one really will be heavier and whether that means anything. At the very least though, this removes the last observable vestige of Squierdom on the guitar.
I'll be trying out blender wiring, and I'm doing some research - found some interesting information on this thread.
Someone on that thread also mentioned star grounding, so I hastened to Radio Shack and bought some Star Ring Terminals. At worst, it will keep things neater. I really should have bought some copper to shield the body while I was at it. Bleh. Anyhow ... I'll solder the 3 pickup groups plus the ground from the volume pot, plus the claw ground to this thing, then run a wire from it to the jack ground. Once I do the copper thing, I can screw the terminal into the copper and I'll be done.
I was prepared to admit defeat yet again, but I think I've got it set up decently. My new feeler gauges helped me to be more confident that I hadn't messed up the truss rod. I compared various measurements to the tele which NY Guitars (30th street) had set up for me recently and they matched pretty well. That is, I capoed the 1st fret and looked at the clearance at the 8th fret when depressing the 22nd, and it pretty much matched. Ditto for the string heights at the 17th fret. So maybe it's ok. It still doesn't feel great, but I think I'll hold off taking it in for a setup and continue tinkering. Besides, I may install a Tremel No, and then I'd be back to square one as far as setup. I still can't see how "the pros" can possibly deal with a floating trem, though of course they do.
Not only can I waste some more money on a Tremel No, I found a review on thegrearpage.net of a really cool tuner, the Turbo Tuner ST-200. I'm sorely tempted to drop $129 on one. Using the tuners I have makes it harder to set intonation, which I seem doomed to do frequently. How could I possibly live without this gadget?
and it sounded terrible because the B string went flat. From a mechanical view, it was clear why this was happening. Bending the G increases the tension on the bridge, which moves forward, thereby decreasing the tension on the other strings, in particular the B.
My first reaction was that this was due my having floated the bridge. I believed this for around a day. However it seems that this can happen in any case, so long as the bridge is free to be pulled forward by the force of a bend. This led me to believe that the strat's design was just fundamentally flawed, at least for any player who wants to do bends and doesn't block (or severely tighten) his trem. However the real world is full of counterexamples and I still don't really get it. Some people on forums say that they have learned to deal with it. One guy even says he presses down with his palm while bending to get around this. I don't like that at all.
I guess I'm not a brilliant philosopher after all. In an earlier post, I raised the question of the point at which my crappy squier becomes a different guitar, or even whether it will always be the squier because the starting point influenced my choices for replacement components along the way. For example, even if it ends up with an el primo callaham trem, that trem will be an "import" size.
It turns out that this line of thought is referred to as The Ship of Theseus, referring to a ship that belonged to Theseus being kept in repair in a museum, which ultimatley replaced all its parts.
Last night, while watching a ball game with stratoh4x0r junior, I decided to restring using the method described in the charming video posted by Galleazo Frudua, an Italian luthier. Aside from specifying a great deal of judicious string-stretching, the novelty seems to be the idea of repeating this process for each string:
repeat
string.tune()
bar.slamDown()
bar.release()
until string.isInTune()
Fudua stresses that, having done this, one should not touch the tuners when the guitar goes out of tune - just hit and release the bar. He also says that the last thing one does after a solo should be to hit and release the bar. It seems to work pretty well, and it does make sense.
I note that in another video of his in which he talks about tuning issues and locking tuners, he doesn't espouse the 1,2,3,3,4,5 O'Clock settings as everyone else seems to. Instead, he seems to use 6 O'Clock for everything. Hmmm.
My new pal from the forums at squier-talk.com sent me the pickup covers, and they arrived yesterday! I installed them, and they fit perfectly! I also took the opportunity to switch to using surgical tubing instead of springs for the pickups. I like that a lot better - the springs are so cumbersome to keep in place. I have no idea if they are sonically better, worse or the same. I suspect that for my ears it's all the same.
So what's left in this project? I will certainly replace the pickups at some point, and try some interesting wiring. Certainly a blender pot.
It occurs to me that maybe I should have bought a used neck. At least then I'd know (or have reason to expect) that the nut was ok, and that it was finished properly. Oh well.
After all my effort to set up the guitar, I just couldn't get it to feel comfortable to play. It was clear the neck was just not adjusted correctly, and I gave in and brought it in to Evan for a setup. Sure enough, he took one look at it, got out his trusty allen wrench driver thing and tightened the neck. I had "way too much relief". I still don't get it, which is discouraging. But now that I have it back from him, I can feel that it plays much better. I'll measure everything and make sure I have a better idea of what a correct setup looks like.
Happily he kept the "Verheyen setup", i.e. I still have the ability to bend up nicely, so I will have fun messing around with that.
I have actually done quite a bit since the last post. I know I've let my readers (hello again Mom) down by not posting regularly. Also, this project hasn't quite gone the way I'd planned, since after Mrs. Stratoh4x0r gave me the cool pickguard art, I really wanted to get it to be usable quickly. So I blitzed through installing the neck, which went fine (I think, more later), and have now got it set up (more later too).
Installing the neck was not bad at all. I had been terrified because everyone was telling me I had to have a drill press. In the end, I just made marks through the body where the holes should go, shifted them a bit up towards the nut, following advice from Ron Kirn in a strat-talk thread. It seems snug and also straight. Hurrah.
So what's left of the original at this point?
Body
Electronics (all)
Screws for switch (blackened with a sharpie)
Yesterday I strung it up and did a setup. This was delayed a bit because one of the holes for the claw was enlarged and I glued a toothpick in it so the screw would have something into which to sink its teeth (or whatever screws have - threads I guess).
I followed the Fender 10 Step Setup as described in Dan Erlewine's book, and Erlewine's other instructions on tremolo adjustment/installation. The only wrinkle was that I didn't have a wooden wedge for the trem block. So I used a bunch of quarters and a dime. It seemed to work, though I felt ridiculous when I was tightening the claw waiting for the coins to fall out. Then I got interested in a Carl Verheyen video about setting up trems, or, as he says he prefers to call it "the wang bar". Apparently he's a famous guy. He certainly plays well and, while the jury seems to be out on whether what he says makes sense, it seemed to work - he sets up the claw in an angle with more tension on the bass side to "counteract" the extra tension of the bass strings. The G bends up a 3 semi-tones, B a whole tone, and high E a half tone. And here it is:
Having done this, and having a fairly easy job setting up the intonation, I decided it plays terribly. It feels really stiff and I have no clue what to do next. So I'm taking it to my great guitar tech on Thursday. As I see it the issue could be
Neck needs a shim
Nut needs filing
Truss rod off
Generally bad setup, though nothing major like the above
I forgot to mention how much I agonized about the truss rod. It seemed that the neck was bowed so I loosened it. I tried the "string as straight edge" and also used a straight edge. In the end, the truss rod was already pretty loose, so I don't know if loosening it did anything. It seemed to. But I wouldn't be surprised if I did exactly the wrong thing. While I now feel comfortable with adjusting intonation, I still don't get neck adjustments, and I can never tell anything by looking down the neck the way cool guitar guys do. Sigh.
Pickup Covers
A bit of weirdness. I bought some generic black pickup covers from allparts to replace the white ones. They didn't fit! The pole piece spacing was off for the bridge pickup, and they were too shallow. Then I learned that imports are 14.7mm high, and can have 50mm pole spacing, as opposed to the usual 52mm pole pacing. I can see that the depth is due to the weird design in which the magnet sticks out of the bottom of the pickup. I'm guessing that Fender had the opportunity to buy 17,000,000 of these cheap from a factory in China and that dictated the dimension. As for the spacing, bleh. That 2mm screwed me up, and I had to enlarge the holes and it looks crappy. However ... a nice guy on strat-talk explained this to me and I did ultimately find what I needed on a UK guitar gear site called axesrus. I clicked through an order and found that the shipping fee was a cool £1,000,000, very funny. However that same nice guy volunteered to mail it to me if I ordered it and had it sent to him! Yet another example of niceness in the online guitar guys community.
The Nice Guy On Strat-talk
The pickup covers arrived in the UK, and the Nice Guy mailed them to me, and didn't even want the money to cover shipping! So now I've saved £1,000,001.82. Perhaps there is hope for humanity. I like to think I would have done likewise.
Someone on that thread also mentioned star grounding, so I hastened to Radio Shack and bought some Star Ring Terminals. At worst, it will keep things neater. I really should have bought some copper to shield the body while I was at it. Bleh. Anyhow ... I'll solder the 3 pickup groups plus the ground from the volume pot, plus the claw ground to this thing, then run a wire from it to the jack ground. Once I do the copper thing, I can screw the terminal into the copper and I'll be done.
