Dub's Wacky Project Guitars Thread--we're baaaaaack

[dubkitty]

i started sanding the headstock. i’m pleased to note that the medium-weight CA dries to a nice consistent density that is hard enough that it’s a bit of a chore leveling out the irregularities in the dried glue. i think it will polish out just fine, perhaps needing a coat of brush-on poly if it won’t buff out on its own. i’m taking this very slowly because i don’t want to have to do this again.

ordered more CA-related stuff from StewMac: aerosol accelerator for the glues so i can work more quickly in thinner layers and avoid unevenness, a plastic mixing palette CA won’t adhere to, and a bunch of plastic dropfill toothpicks which i trust more than pooting glue out of the bottle via a “whiptip.”

once the black headstock work is reasonably “done,” i’ll build out the ding in the white-painted side of the headstock. this will be my testbed for mixing the correct tint to match the Vintage White i.e. slightly yellowed hue. when the headstock is sorted i’ll use some of the fingerboard grain filler to build out the ding on the left lower bout, which was helpful when working on the damage to the Kondor, till it’s close to the necessary height. obviously i’m leaving the neck for last. i don’t know if it would be better to work CA into the finish cracks, or to sand that area down and use the CA like repair paint. leaning towards working it in, which i think will preserve the neck contour best.

i’m eager to have the Jetstar in full service. i’ve been playing it in between work sessions and with the new Stetsbar handle and the pickups swapped front-to-back and cranked up it’s an absolute beast if a well-mannered one. the trem has a Bigsby feel but is a bit more precise…it’d be perfect for playing “Marquee Moon.” it’s kind of like a Firebird’s cousin that goes to continuation school, huge on the bass pickup and snarly on the bridge especially through the AC15 with Top Boost on. i’m slightly tempted to add a third LB-1 as Guild calls them nowadays, but i can resist.

it’s kind of amazing how the idea of taking pickups from what for all intents and purposes was a dead guitar to put in the sparkly blue DeArmond wound me up with two guitars that work so well for me that i have a non-tremolo M-75 coming in.

why do i not just use filler and rattlecans? because i live in a small 5th floor apartment, have nowhere i could go to use spray paint, and am a terrible spray painter.

[dubkitty]

i sanded the end of the headstock face with 800 grit until it was reasonably smooth. i stull have a couple or three lighter weights to do before polishing so i'm not tremendously concerned about having it perfectly smooth yet. the CA is solid enough that it was tough to sand through the excess from my layers of glue, so i feel pretty good about it as a minor structural element. the biggest problem is that the glue dries to a blueish-grey that doesn't match the paint, but i can just go over it with the black lacquer pen. the light triangle happened somehow, i'm not sure exactly how. it's a vuisible defect only; you can't feel it when you run your fingertip across the surface. it'll also get touched up. there are a few places where the black slipped under the masking tape, but they'll either be covered by the white CA or scraped off with a blade. the actual edge looks reasonably consistent. i'm now a lot less worried about getting an acceptable result on all the damaged areas.

it's beginning to develop a vibe of its own. it looks ready to jump up and bite you. like Casper the Friendly Ghost's evil ghost nemeses. the replacement handle is more consistent with the design's Alternate Futures Of 1962 feel, while the round modern handle similar to a Les Trem was anomalously REAL-modern. the new handle makes it look more like something off a 60s Italian or British guitar.

[dubkitty]

sanded the headstock down to wet sanding with 2000 grit. i think it’ll polish out just fine, but will definitely need touched up with the lacquer pen. the filled part is nice and smooth to the touch, and the filled area is pretty well as flat as the surrounding surface. i’m going to leave it for now and wait for the CA accelerator to arrive before starting on the white edge. i see no point in polishing out the face before the edge is also done…you KNOW something’s gonna fuck it up. the StewMac stuff is due on Wednesday, along with a bunch of other stuff including preamp tubes for the AC15 and the DeArmond M-75. woop woop. i’m finally making progress on this thing.

[dubkitty]

looking at the most recent full photo i’m surprised once again by the great difference in feel and “rightness” a small thing like changing the tremolo arm makes to the overall vibe. i’m reminded of how much more like itself the Epiphone SG looks with the new/correct bridge and tuner buttons.

[dubkitty]

the current Jetstar thread is going to be derailed briefly by me getting the DeArmond M-75 that just arrived set up and in service. it’s generally in good shape, but there are a few minor issues that need to be sorted.

it’s literally the little/big brother of the blue sparkly DeArmond M-75T i got last year, in a Very Serious “Moon Blue” finish that’s almost black under indoor lights. the DeArmond Gold Tone pickups are the attraction here, a uniquely DeA take on a humbucker with a second row of flat polepieces leveled just below their apertures in the cover. they have more air in them than PAFs, and a POP to the pick attack that’s almost a DeArmond signature. when i cranked it up last night before destringing it and starting the cleanup/tuneup phase it sounded great, snd more importantly sounded like me.

there aren’t a lot of issues, but there are a few annoying little things. there are some deep scratches in a couple of odd places, two small dings on the edge of the headstock, and an area where the harp tailpiece meets the top that had 30 years of crud under the base that disrupted the finish a bit. the frets could stand a polishing but are in good overall shape. when it arrived the action was too low for me, but the guitar played without buzzes and rattles all along the fretboard indicating that the neck is reasonably flat and straight.

one irksome aspect is the knobs and other plastic parts. 3 of the 4 knobs exhibit some chipping around the upper edge; i hope to build those out with the black CA and strategic shots of accelerator. the toggle switch knob broke while i was handling the guitar for cleaning. i had spares in the parts box so it’s fine.

i need to decide whether to polish out the pick scratches on the top between the pickups that extend out an inch or 2 on either side, or just call it battle scars and move on. the pickguard is so scratched-up that i ordered a new one from Pickguardian…it was only $25 which is worth not having to spend several hours doing tedious hand work.

today’s agenda is remounting the tailpiece and bridge, stringing it up, and setting the pickup heights, polepieces, bridge height, neck relief, and intonation. when i played it briefly before starting to work on it it sounded just like me even with half-dead strings. i’m well on my way to having a little battalion of Guilds and Guilds Lite, and i couldn’t be more surprised to have taken to them as i have. when the Double Jet is done i’ll have the same number of Guilds/DeArmonds as i do of Gretsches.

last night before i started taking things apart.

[dubkitty]

i’m excited about the rest of the CA stuff arriving, but i’m not in a rush to get it done RIGHT NOW. i want to practice on scrap first before i do anything drastic to the finish. it’s close enough to done that i can play it comfortably, so it can wait a minute.

[dubkitty]

just popped into Reverb and discovered that saving “dearmond knobs” in my feed searches had turned up a nice set of black DeArmond knobs which i snapped up. they’re nicer than the current ones, which besides the chipping are trying to peel at the foil “D” stickers at the top of the knobs. one also separated where the head meets the shaft when i was removing the knobs last night. i wasn’t expecting these since there were none anywhere when i looked 18 hours ago. one more problem solved. woop woop.

[dubkitty]

still in the early phase of accessioning the M-75. i started out setting the pickups by balancing everything on the bridge pickup to the B string which sounded best to me and then bringing up (or dialing down) the neck pickup to balance it. my first set of adjustments sounded good, but the pickups were too close to the strings so if i hit a loud 3-note chord in the middle of the neck the preamp tubes would distort. is that what normie guitarists mean by "hitting the front end of the amp"? as mentioned these are the hottest pickups i've ever used other than those insane 12k P-90s in the Wildkat. so i backed everything down about 1.5-2 mm which helped a lot. probably going to go a little lower still...i've found that doing this kind of setup works better if i do short bursts of activity and then let my ears recover. they need to do that because in order to hear what a guitar's doing i really need to hear it at a level louder than casual conversation, and if i overtax my ears everything just sounds grey and flat as if my ears had dog vision. i fiddled with it at 8-8:30 so i should be OK now. it's a fine line here, as it often is with the kinds of guitars and pickups i favor, between showing excessive character and not hitting hard enough. i still want them to sound like hot trebly humbuckers, just not hot trebly humbuckers through a cranky Pignose.

i need to let the truss rod out just a bit and lower the bridge commensurately...the lower strings can get a bit rattly. there's also a variety of other annoying small issues to catalog and fix: scratches and dings, a missing teflon washer on one tuner, a bit of corrosion on a couple of frets. and i need to spray out the pots and switch. the switch pops like you'd expect when using it as a kill switch (FWIW i have never had a guitar, US or imported, with a 3-position toggle switch that didn't pop at least a bit when doing this), but the pots seem pretty clean. i'd like to put the silver-mica capacitors in it that i have in the Dyna Pro Jet and the SG because they actually do pass a bit more highs than most capacitors, but looking for them online made my head hurt something awful. i should stock up on them assuming i can find them, because they might be nice additions to the Wandré, Jazzmaster, and the putative Supro/Bigsby and baritone Jazzmaster projects. other than the SG which really needed help and the M-75 which is naturally toppier than a PAF the idea of silver-mica caps in humbucker guitars doesn't appeal. they don't need augmented highs.

turns out the utility of the Tonestyler is limited. according to a thread i Googled up on the Gear Pages it doesn't work with lower-impedance pickups by which the poster meant ~4.5kΩ. which in Bob World terms means it won't work on the Kondor or the bass pickup on the Wandré, and probably not on the Supro Bigsby either. my favorite application for the TS yet was in a Stratocaster...i could sound like two or three different Strats and all of Jerry Garcia's single-coil guitars from the 70s. i definitely plan to put one in my second (60s) Strat when i put it together. for it to work well it also needs to be in a circuit with only a volume knob and the TS so the only things in my gang that could work would be the Jazzmaster, Jetstar, and baritone Jazzmaster. i'll have to inquire at Stellartone HQ for recommendations for a model best suited to baritone. however, i'm planning on trying out the G&L passive tone circuit which has bass and treble roll-offs in the baritone, so the TS might be in the way. i don't want to wind up with a rat's nest like the Alembic Starfire Bass conversions which look like a telephone exchange inside.

[dubkitty]

while tuning the M-75 at one point before going to bed last night i noticed again that the wound strings were muffled, almost as if they were being subtly muted. i tried optimizing the saddle slots but it still wasn’t great. i took a look at the bridge and hypothesized that the saddles hadn’t been well-cut. refiling the slots helped a little, but it seemed like that bridge was pretty worn out and was damping everything a tad. so i went into the parts box and found a similar modern Tunomatic which dropped right in. it helped a lot…now when i pick a low string i hear some higher partials and a bit of metallic ZING that weren’t there before. all that was required was filing the 6th string slot a bit so it’s more than a tiny dimple on the sharp edge of the saddle. it really makes me happy to be able to diagnose these little problems and fix them.

most of the remaining M-75 tasks are minor finish fixes, besides adding the new knobs and guard. knobs are supposed to arrive on Friday, not sure when the guard will
get here. by then i should have the other little shit done.

i’m going to take a nap because it’s Saturday and because i can. after i get up i’ll start back up with the Jetstar.

[dubkitty]

it seems like the previous owner(s) either sweated like crazy or stored the guitar in a humid environment. the old bridge has corroded in ways that chewed up the plating on the saddles especially at the bass end. there’s also some pitting and staining of the chrome between and at the ends of the saddle slots. i suspect that if i took it apart i’d find all sorts of crud and/or rust inside. no point in bothering though because it’s just a generic turn-of-the-millennium tunomatic from an Asian import; i literally had two just like it in the parts box. it’s not the worst i’ve ever seen but it’s pretty funky.

when i took off the hardware to clean the body up there was an area about 1” square at the bottom of the harp tailpiece where the cutout “D” logo is located that had built-up dirt and other indeterminate material thick enough to require liquid polish and a fair bit of force to remove. when it was gone an area at the very bottom of about 1/8” showed surface damage that compromised the top finish leaving about 3 mm of missing paint. it’s completely invisible behind the tailpiece so i left it alone since i’m not planning on taking it to a sauna any time soon.

the corrosion on the screw heads wasn’t as bad as it looked in the seller’s photos, more like patina than rust in real life. it was worst on the pickup adjustment screws on the bridge pickup, which would tend to support the sweat theory. but where the hell did all that crap behind the tailpiece come from? it was like flood debris.

those are the only places that show significant corrosion other than a few spots on the frets, which argues against a long-term humid/ocean environment. if it had been damp/salty i’d also expect pitting on the chrome tuners and tailpiece and noise in the pots, neither of which is present. so i think it was nurture, not nature, that made things rust. i’m still puzzled by the tailpiece thing, though, because i’ve seen/have a lot of guitars with surface/end-mounted trems and never seen anything like that. so i guess the moral of today’s post is, for fuck’s sake clean up your guitar ASAP after using it if you’re sweating buckets. when i played outdoors last year when it was in the 90s there were sheets of dried sweat on the ES-335, not surprising since i soaked a t-shirt during each set. but when we finished i cleaned both guitars off before i put them away. imagine if i’d left it for six months. a fair bit of working on guitar projects is wondering “how the fuck did that happen?”

[Blackened Soul]

I’ve gotten a few basses like that AND they never cleaned their fingerboards…. One the Ibanez I used the neck for on my 6 string fling v bass and the other was my blue Musicman sub5, I am thankful they use stainless for their saddles and screws… both those basses took hours to clean all the crud off them…

[Blackened Soul]

The knobs you got were black right? You never found more clear ones?

[dubkitty]

yes, black knobs. after looking at literally dozens of examples of various DeArmonds with every possible combination of black and clear plastics i decided that black was best because the top color is so dark and featureless that it really wouldn’t gain anything visually with a clear guard and knobs. both pretty much disappear into the blue abyss of the top. clear DeA knobs are much less common than black ones…i could barely even find any in expired listings. if i’d decided to go with clear i’d have gotten Guild knobs, which are slightly different but close enough in form that they could probably pass.

[dubkitty]

i think i figured out the problem with the Aristocrat’s truss rod. it’s definitely some kind of Gibson-esque deal with a hex nut as the end of the rod, but i think the Guild has the nut as a fitting that actually turns the rod rather than traveling along its length like a Gibson. i have two hex sockets the same size that came with my Tokais, and are too large for the nut. StewMac sells 3 different sizes in SAE measurements which are useless for a MIK guitar. Google says Tokais used 8 mm nuts and MIK Guilds used a 7 mm nut. it looks like someone rounded off the front corners of the nut using a socket that was too big, but it appears that flat sides do exist further back. it would be nice to sort that because it’s really the only remaining issue with it. so i ordered a 7 mm wrench from my good buddies at Philadelphia Luthier Tools, from whom i’ve gotten a few random doo-dads via eBay, that will be here in a few days. hope it works both because it would be another DIY Guy win and because the Aristocrat would then be ready to cook. i think about half a turn would take the biscuit.

[dubkitty]

am i spacing on the Jetstar this weekend? why, yes, i am. my girlfriend’s been in a rehabilitation facility being treated for a back injury since last Friday and it’s been wearying worrying and supporting her. i need fine-pointed concentration for the upcoming Jetstar stuff and just don’t have the energy for anything but puttering. it’s OK, it’s not going anywhere, just waiting for the Right Time in a Chinese sense. and i feel OK with it because i’m solving other problems while it’s percolating. i won’t be touching a guitar with intent from now till sometime Monday at the earliest because i’m taking Becky home tomorrow and staying there to help her get settled in with the new restrictions she has on bending, stretching, etc. while her back heals.