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.

Getting Ready To Route

My experiments with that crappy body worked out pretty well.  I realized that if I removed the spring from the router I could get more depth, so I did that.  And I bought a second bit so I could be sure it was as sharp as possible. I also realized that I need to cover a bit more area on the right (as seen from the back, or else the post hole wouldn't hit the block. To guide the router, I taped some pieces of wood to the back of the body, and tomorrow's the big day.

The task will be even more exciting because I have new safety goggles and a new respirator.  The last time, I skipped using goggles because mine were so crummy, and my eyes felt weird for a few days.  So clearly that was not a good idea, and I found some cool DeWalt goggles.

Screw Sizes

One of the most widely read posts on this blog is on the topic of screw sizes.  If you don't recall it word for word, it is worth re-reading it now.  It is now obvious to me that the correct formula is

               diameter =  
where N is the number of the screw. This is rigged so that a #1 screw is 1/16 inch, and #5 is 1/8 inch. And amazingly, a #10 comes out to 3/16 inch. Incredible. So in a nutshell, we start at 0 being 1/16 and go up by 1/16 for each 5 numbers.

Ready To Do Some Work This Weekend

You'll recall that my last post ended with this cliffhanger:

I need to buy some more stuff

• neck plate and screws
• strap buttons
• Volume/Tone/Blend knobs
• string tree

So, first off, let me resolve the tension I created last time.  I've obtained all of this stuff ... and more. In particular, I've ordered some genuine Fender (c) white felt washers, and also purchased a cordless Dremel (foreshadowing).  However now that I think of it, I need to get some longer screws for the strap buttons, as recommended by someone on Strat-Talk (perhaps Ron Kirn), and quoted by me in a previous post.  Hurrah.


Routing


A critical part of my build is installing the wood block under the trem.  The el cheapo body I ordered did arrive and is perfect for my purpose of learning how to do the routing.  Here's a rough picture of the part of the body that I'll work on

Think of this as looking at the bottom of the body, sighting from the end towards the neck pocket.   The bridge posts will sit on the top of the shaded part, and the "empty" part has already been routed out.











The diagram is a cross section of what you'd see if you had a little camera in the spot routed out for the trem block, pointing towards the neck pocket.  I need to rout out a piece that is 2.25x1x(1.022-0.125), i.e. 2.25 x 1 x 0.897.  The depth comes from allowing 1/8 inch of the original body to remain.  The spec for the trem says that the ferrules are 0.886 long.  Using the theory of subtraction, 0.125 of this will be in the Paulownia, and 0.886 - 0.125 = 0.761 inch will be in the block I glue in there.  As a bonus corollary, the "perfect" block size would be 2.25 x 1 x 0.761.  Perhaps later I will post the actual measurements of the mulberry block I'm using.  It's pretty close, just a bit deeper which isn't a problem.


The Jig Is Up



The piece of wood taped on the body was my first attempt at creating a "jig", i.e. something to guide the router so I don't cut too far.  Really it's more important to get the sides right, so I guess I'll tape on two more pieces perpendicular to this one.  I bought a piece of 1x2 from the local lumberyard.  In the process, I learned that any NxM piece of wood is not really NxM inches, since there's "shrinkage".  For example, a 1x2 is really 0.75x1.75.  I had planned to do the routing with my trusty corded Dremel and the new plunge router I bought And in fact, I did do some, out in the hallway, however my son, Stratos Jr., suggested that it might annoy our sensitive neighbors (who have in fact complained about other noises from our apartment). Then Mrs H4x0r chimed in, leading me to sulk for a while.  I then ordered the finest cordless Dremel money can buy and went back to sulking. It arrived a few days and it looks nice, though it's kind of heavy compared to the the corded one, probably due to the massive battery.  My plan is to do all my routing on the roof (I live in an apartment, so the roof, to which I am lucky enough to have access, is a big flat expanse with a few picnic tables which I can use as workbenches).


Next Steps


Now that I have all my goodies, I will proceed thus

• Tape two more wood strips to the body to guide the router on the sides of the hole
• Go up to the roof and rout the cheap body (bringing the dust buster for clean up of course)
• Assuming that all works ok, do the same on the Paulownia body

If I had to bet, I will only get through the first two, and the third will have to wait for next weekend, which is the start of my being "on holiday" as they say in Weehawken.

Routing

Well, I've got my Dremel Plunge router attachment, although now I am kind of wishing I'd bought a Skil router instead. For what I'm doing it probably doesn't matter.  Unfortunately, still don't have the cheapo body I bought for experimenting, so I won't able to do anything until next weekend.  Anyway, I don't have the neck yet anyway.

I found a nice page at the Rockler site that explains what some of the different router bits do.  It seems that for my very specific task, I might be most correct using a rabbeting bit, but it also seems as though I'll be fine with my "plain" router bit.

The Plan

1. Rout area beneath the trem posts
2. Glue in mulberry block
3. Cover with wood filler and blacken with a sharpie
4. Put neck on, securing with clamp if holes not drilled or not aligned
5. Put trem in place
6. Put on high and low E strings to help with positioning
7. After tons of measuring, mark holes for trem posts
• Idea: put pickguard on and use that for a sanity check on location of posts
8.  Drill holes using rockler thing
9. Insert posts
1. Need rubber hammer?
2. Glue in with epoxy or CA?
10. Drill neck holes if needed

Crap

I need to buy some more stuff

• neck plate and screws
• strap buttons
• Volume/Tone/Blend knobs
• string tree

Useful Paulownia Info

From this post on tdpri:

some tips in using paulownia ... now, this is a soft wood - perhaps softer than soft white pine. do not over tighten neck screws. replace all strap button screws with ones much longer - i use 3" steel screws. pre-drill bridge, control plate and pickguard screws with a drill bit no larger in diameter than 1/16". after screwing in a screw, back it out and you can strengthen that hole with a few drops of quality thin cya - allow time for the cya to harden! do not use a standard tele jack cup, instead use an electrosocket jack cup and do not pre-drill the screw holes - just screw gun the screws directly into the wood.   

Another Build

For some reason or other, I'm doing another build. Specs will be

• GFS Paulownia Daphne Blue body
• Allparts SRSF-SW neck
• 22 jumbo stainless steel frets (.110" x .055"), modern
• Maple neck with vintage tinted finish
• Rosewood fingerboard with Abalone oval inlays
• Compound radius 9.5" - 12"
• Nut width 1-11/16"
• Heel width 2-3/16"
• Tuning Peg Hole Diameter .375"
• Truss Rod adjustment at head
• Neck thickness .87" at first fret, .98" at twelfth fret
• Hipshot locking tuners
• Lace Sensor pickups: Neck (Gold), Middle (Gold), Bridge (Burgundy)
• Blender wiring, pots, caps from Acme
• Wilkinson/Gotoh 2-point trem from Stewmac

The Body

Here's a picture

Interestingly, here's what was written on the thin protective foamy thing the bag came in:

According to a friend who knows Chinese very well, "as individual characters, they mean 'strong, powerful' and 'green'".  I suppose the moral is that when green becomes strong and powerful, it becomes daphne and blue.

I plan to glue in a block of harder wood in the spot under where the posts for the trem go, just like last time, as described in this post, and subsequently here.  I'll try to do a better job this time, and so I may buy another router bit and take a crack at using that dremel attachment.  OTOH, I'm still going to use a piece of my son's hockey stick, since it worked pretty well last time, and I have a piece that is almost exactly the right size.

Poor Man's Drill Press

For this time, I bought a Rockler Drill Bit Guide, which got very good comments on ebay.  It's a simple device and it should make it easier to drill decent holes.  Though I did ok the last few times just doing it by hand.

More on Gluing a Block of Wood Into the Body


As mentioned above, this was the iffiest part of the process last time.  This time I've ordered a poor man's plunge router attachment for my dremel moto-tool, along with a router bit.

Also, I bought an el-cheapo used body from a guy on squier-talk for $20, including shipping.  I'll perfect my routing skills on this body and then try it on the GFS body.  It would be great if the body and router arrive before this weekend so I can take a crack at it.

tex test

When $a \ne 0$, there are two solutions to \(ax^2 + bx + c = 0\) and they are $$x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}.$$

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch

It's been quite some time since I last posted - like four months.  Here's a quick update on a few things, so that I can move on in my next post, which may not take quite so long to materialize.

Matt Schofield, Robben Ford, Diminished Scales and The Cool Riff

A few things came together for me.  I listened to Matt Schofield a lot, and was intrigued by some of the jazzy sounding things he was doing.  With my world view of basically "Pentatonic + some extra notes", it was very hard to understand, even if I could transcribe his solos.  A guy on jazzguitar.be pointed me in the right direction - the diminished scale when I posted a question about the Djam solo.  After that, things started to make a bit more sense, and I went through many, many attempts at figuring out his fingerings before achieving enlightenment.

An important step was reading an interview with Schofield in Premier Guitar, in which he describes having the same experience I had when listening to him, when he heard Misdirected Blues by Robben Ford. If you haven't heard this track, you owe it to yourself to listen - the playing is incredible.   Listen to Misdirected Blues at 2:09, then listen to Every Day I Have The Blues from The Trio, Live, starting at 4:19. My point isn't that I caught Matt Schofield copying Robben Ford, but that it's cool to see where he got it.  And a cool jazz guy would undoubtedly tell me that Ford got it from someone else.

Here's Matt Schofield playing the riff, and here's Robben Ford. Finally, here's a track that starts with Ford, then plays Schofield, where I have changed the key of Schofield's riff from Bb and C and slowed him down from 135 to 110 BPM to match Ford.

Then, after a lot of transcribing and navel-gazing, I came across this excellent video on youtube where a guy explains the exact same riff (and more)!

Transcribing a Great Solo

There's a great solo on Matt Schofield's Siftin' Through Ashes. The song is called Djam, most likely because it is a jam in Dm11. Here's a link to it on grooveshark, with apologies to those outside the US. I was drawn to it because the song structure is very simple, and the solo is a departure from the usual blues clichés, yet seemed like something I might be able to learn.

Here's the snippet I transcribed; it runs from 2:38 to 3:35.


And here is my transcription. You can download it directly here. I did this by hand first (and second, third, ...) then typed it in to Bucket O' Tab, an ancient Windows program. I feel a bit silly about that, since I have every conceivable tab program, all of which have many features and produce beautiful output. However BOT is easy to use, very simple, and works well with keyboard input. Most importantly, it doesn't force one to figure out the note durations, and I am bad at that. My feeling about tab is that I know what it's supposed to sound like, and I just want to see the tab, with some some additional text, or bars, or whatever to give me hints. It is pretty funny to see BOT's file dialog box, which is from the days when windows file names had to be "8.3" format - so the long file names are truncated and end with ~1.



Here it is in ASCII:

2:39                          Dm11                                                        
5--|-----------------------|--5--|---------------------------------------------||---------
6--|-----------------------|--6--|---------------------------------------------||---------
5--|--5--5--5--5--5--5--7--|--5--|--5--5--5--5--5--5--5--5--5--7--3/4----------||---------
5--|-----------------------|--5--|-------------------------------------5--5/7--||---------
5--|-----------------------|--5--|---------------------------------------------||---------
---|-----------------------|-----|---------------------------------------------||---------
                                                                                          


2:59                        Very rapid slide                                              
-------------------------------------------------------------||---------------------------
-----6p5-----------------------------------------------------||---------------------------
6h7-------7--5-----7-----5-----------------------------------||---------------------------
----------------7-----7-----(7)\5--(7)\5--3-----3--3---------||---------------------------
---------------------------------------------5--------5p(3)--||---------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------||---------------------------
                                                                                          


3:06                                                                                      
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------||---------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------||---------
-----6p5-----------7-----5-----------------------------------------------------||---------
6h7-------7--5--7-----7-----(7)\5--(7)\5--(7)\5--3--------3--3-----------------||---------
----------------------------------------------------5--3--------5--5--3--------||---------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------5--3--||---------
                                                                                          


3:14                                                                                      
----------8p7-----5-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----6p5-------8-----6--5-----------------------------------------------------------------
6h7------------------------7--5-----7-----5-----------------------------------------------
---------------------------------7-----7-----(7)\5--(7)\5--3--------3---------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------5--3-----5--3-----3--5------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------5------------
                                                                                          


                                                                                          
---------------------------------8p7-----5-----------------||-----------------------------
-----------------------6p5------------8-----6p5------------||-----------------------------
-----------------5--7-------7p5------------------7p5-------||-----------------------------
---3-----3--5/7---------------------------------------7p5--||-----------------------------
5-----5----------------------------------------------------||-----------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------||-----------------------------
                                                                                          


3:25                                                                                      
7^--7^--5--------------------------------------------------------------||-----------------
-----------6-----------------------------------------------------------||-----------------
--------------7--5-----5h7p5\4-----------------------------------------||-----------------
--------------------7-----------7p5--5h6p5-----5--------5--6-----5-----||-----------------
--------------------------------------------8-----5--8--------7-----8--||-----------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------||-----------------
                                                                                          


3:30                                                                                      
---------------------------4--6h7p6p4\3---------------------------------------------------
------------------5--6--8----------------\5--3--------------------------------------------
---------4--6--7--------------------------------4\3--(0)----------------------------------
5--6--8---------------------------------------------------3p2p0---------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------3------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                                                     

Too Rolling Stoned

I spent a little time learning some of the riffs from the second solo on Robin Trower's Too Rolling Stoned. Most of these riffs are pretty simple, but his phrasing is really impressing me. There's a little bit that I'll have to write about that really illustrates that. Just writing down the individual notes, it doesn't look like much, but the combination of bends and vibrato really make it great.

I tried to write this out tonight using tabledit, but failed miserably because, while I'm good at figuring out the notes, and how to play the bit correctly, I am terrible at figuring out how to do the timing part of the notation. So I spent ages fiddling around without getting it.

It's great stuff to play though

Matt Schofield Snippet from Every Day I have the Blues

Note the last two bars which give a cool way to play a standard I VI II V turnaround (in Bb). Hmm, I wonder if a link to a midi file will work?

String Tension Calculations

I've been listening to Matt Schofield a lot - really a lot. The last time I went to the gym, I looped 2 minutes of one of his solos for 30 minutes, trying to get it to magically seep into my brain. It made it into my brain in that I can now hear it, but I still can't play it. I can sort of hear that he's using heavier strings, and it does turn out that he's using 11's. I've always been curious what that would be like, but the extra tension on my fingers held me back. Then it occurred to me that using 11's on a short scale guitar might be the same as using 10's on a standard 25.5" scale strat. A little bit of math later (see below), and I now know this: Let $g$ denote the string gauge (e.g. 10, 11, 12), and $S$ the scale length in inches. In order to have the same tension on the E string as a strat using 10's, the scale length would have to be \[ \frac{10}{g} 25.5 \] This is intuitively appealing, but takes some justification. The disappointing part is that, if $g = 11$, then the resulting scale is \( S = \frac{10}{11} 25.5 = 23.18 \) which is well below the other readily available reasonable scale length of 24.5. The other thing that guys who use big strings do is to tune down a half step. So we can ask a different question: Given a string gauge (e.g. 11), if we tune down 1/2 step, what scale length would we need in order to match the tension of the high E of a strat with 10's and standard tuning? The answer is that the scale length would be given by \[ S = 2^{\frac{1}{12}} \cdot \frac{10}{g} \cdot 25.5 \] The extra factor comes in because of the detuning, since the frequency of an E is $2^{\frac{1}{12}}$ times that of the Eb one step lower. Plugging in 11, we get \[ S = 24.56 \] Aha! So if you put 11's on a 24.5" scale guitar, and tune down 1/2 step, the high E will have the same string tension as on a regular strat strung with 10's. This leads one inextricably to this conclusion: the standard "gibson" scale length was selected in order to allow strat players who are used to 10's to comfortably use 11's when tuned down a half step! I'll post the formulae another time. They follow from two relationships. The first gives the string tension as a function of the unit weight of the string, scale length, and the frequency to which the string is tuned. The second is the observation that if an unwound string of gauge (i.e. diameter) $g$ has unit weight $w$, then a similar string of gauge $g'$ will have unit weight scaled up by $ {\left( \frac{g^\prime}{g} \right) }^2 $

Chords

This is kind of a nice way to go from E9 to Edim7.   Note that it's moveable.

2--3
3--2
1--3
2--2
----
----

Note that the first chords is just the bottom half of a regular E shape but with the 7th added on the 2nd string and   9th added on the 1st.

I Make Some Purchases

I've now bought

• a set of Seymour Duncan SP90-2 pickups.  Somehow I quickly got the idea that I wanted to have a guitar with P90's in it.  Perhaps because of that Les Paul I stupidly sold so many years ago. 
• a set of satin chrome Sperzels

I think I'll hold off on installing the pickups and just assemble the cobcaster body, Mighty Mite neck, GFS trem, GFS pickups, and try doing a new nut if it seems that's called for.

Next Project

I'm definitely going to leave the COBCaster alone and move on to another project.  At this point, I've got a lot of parts lying around:

• Squier body (basswood, not bad)
• Squier neck (ugh)
• Mighty Mite neck (not bad)
• Pickups
• Fender American Std bridge pickup
• Lace Sensor Gold pickup
• Set of GFS vintage something or other strat pickups
• Fender tele pickups from '92 MIM
• Bridges
• Squier 6 hole trem
• GFS 6 hole trem
• Tele MIM bridge
• Miscellaneous electronic stuff: caps, pots (including a nice push/pull), switches

I could easily throw together something without buying anything, but where's the fun in that? So I ordered a set of Seymour Duncan P-90's (SP90-2).  I got a good deal on ebay, $135 including shipping for a new set.  Now I need a pickguard, or I suppose I could try to cut out the squier pickguard with my dremel.   I also need some tuners for the Mighty Mite neck, and I'll probably go with the same Sperzels I used on the COBcaster.  

The parts I'll need to buy  are

• Tuners (likely to be black Sperzels)
• Pickups (on order)
• 500K pots, 0.047 cap (may have this)
• Switch (leaning towards using a Gibson style, rather than Fender style blade)
• Pickguard, unless I just cut down one I have to fit the P90's (if I do that, I have to use a blade)
• Bridge, unless I use the GFS I have. It's tempting to get boogie rail.

Nuts & Next Project

I just got my guitar back from Evan, and the biggest thing he had to do was to work on the nut. This is one of the remaining tasks that fill me with terror. Maybe it's time to learn how to do it using my spare parts. This article seems useful: STEWMAC.COM : Making a Nut, Step-by-Step Free information.  I'll read through the chapter in Erlewine's book first.

For my next stunt, I may try out P90 pickups.  It seems that Kinmans are quite good.  He's got some instructions about installation in a strat that should be helpful.

Custom Pickguards

I may do a 7/8 model from Warmoth. If so, I could send in the pickguard and have this guy make a clear copy:

Sending Tracings, Originals or Other Packages : Terrapin Guitars, Custom Pick Guards