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

[dubkitty]

i was going through my list of projects and stuff needed from outside and decided to simplify the setup on the Galaxiemaster. there's no practical reason for individual pickup volume rollers because i never do that kind of blending, and a rotary switch pickup selector like the one in the Kondor is much easier to use than individual pickup on/off switches (not that i change pickups that often when i play). so i'll go with a master volume knob roughly where a Jazzmaster pickup selector switch lives, and a rotary selector switch and the Schaller tone circuit from the Hopf donor pickguard in place of the regular volume and tone knobs. i was going to try to emulate the Galaxie setup as much as possible, but on reflection it's less practical than the modified Hopf approach.

i'm also considering making the second Strat into a multi-pickguard affair. i'd start with the CS '69 Strat pickups this is predicated on, and adopt another of Jerry Garcia's innovations by making the controls a separate plate from the pickups so you can get at the wiring without having to unstring the guitar and take the whole bloody pickguard off. then i'd have the option of making other pickup guard modules that i could swap in and out using some kind of plug connectors. this would only work with 3-pickup arrangements, though. i could do gold foils, Firebird pickups, and perhaps the Simetos left over from the Musima (i'm sure i can get a third pickup cheap because the internet is chock-full of Warsaw Pact guitars either in parlous shape or parted out). i might also do one with three of the metal-cased open-top Guyatone pickups like the one in the bridge position of the Kondor. i wouldn't do a whole guitar just for that, but a loaded half-guard would be much cheaper and simpler. that would let the one Strat take the place of multiple guitars and save me a ton of money and hassle...i'd much rather set up one neck/bridge/tremolo than 3 or 4. i'd better get locking tuners to make swapping guards less problematic, though, which has worked really well on the Kondor. i first thought about this adaptation years ago, but was never really in a place where i could do it. it might be wise to inset screw sockets into the body and use machine screws for mounting the guards so the wood doesn't get chewed up.

i think this originally happened because the guard broke.

that would actually croak most of the remaining types of pickups on my have/want list. i just went through the list and that'd get me down to only 4 more guitars. i still want to do the Teles, though, and think WRHBs would be best in one. i'll just get a Squier for that one and swap out the fake WRHBs for real ones, and maybe redo the wiring. no point reinventing the wheel. and then there's the Supro Bigsby thing. so relax, y'all...i've got at least another 2 years of content.

[dubkitty]

i've been having a time getting the Kondor sorted. i screwed up the nut by over-filing it trying to get rid of an unpleasant rattle and once it was sorted i still had the noise. i tried tightening down the tuner bushings and doing the string posts with multiple wraps to get the break angle over the nut right, but still it rattled. the problem apparently was insufficient break angle over the nut for the 1st-4th strings. eventually i changed the strings to Power Slinkys (.011-.048), wound multiple wraps to improve the break angle on the bottom 2 strings, and regretfully installed string trees for the top 2 string pairs. this seems to have largely settled things, but it still gets weird occasionally and i can't figure out why for the life of me. i also reset the pickups so they're all straight relative to the pickguard and will twiddle polepieces later. i still have to do the black lacquer on the repaired parts of the body, and that won't happen today because a friend who plays in several post-Dead bands is in Richmond tonight and i haven't seen him in ages. so i guess it'll be Saturday before it gets finished. i also need to fill a hole in the headstock, and in the condor sticker, where i mislocated the 1+2 string tree and had to relocate it to get the same break angle over the nut for all four strings. not quite sure what to do about that yet. i'm about ready to be done with this thing, and i still need to file the Hopf nut. the new StewMac files kick butt, and i'm glad i had to do the Kondor nut first because it got my chops up.

[dubkitty]

i guess i could do a second control plate to accomodate 2-pickup setups and get the WRHBs in there too. the problem is that if i want a particular setup that pretty much means it’s the only option to be used for a particular session. if i’m looping with gold foils and want the WRHBs i’m shit out of luck because a best-case swap time would be at least ten minutes.

[dubkitty]

i got out the Jetstar because i hadn’t played it for awhile and it’s a good guitar. the famously mis-specced LB-1 pickups sound just fine when adjusted, and when i play it new ideas come out. but its host of problems still need to be addressed. in addition to the cracks that need to be filled and sanded out where the neck was broken and repaired, there’s a big ding on the edge of the left lower bout and one on the tip of the headstock that will need to be filled, leveled, and painted with the aged white/black color scheme. the finish stuff will get worked up with StewMac’s Fill and Finish cyanoacrylate; i’ll have to find some way to match a final touchup color to the original finish.

but that’s really just the surface stuff, and it’s playable with those problems. the functionality problems are the 2d fret which needs to be leveled and the tailpiece stud anchors which don’t sit flush with the top as Stetsbar recommends—they have a flange at the top—and which are trying to pull out of their sockets from serving as pivot points.i’ll need to either pull the anchors and cut a bit around the top edges of the sockets so the collars on them are flush, or order different ones. seems like it’s worth $10 in parts not to do even more woodworking. i’ll also need to figure out how to keep them from backing out, maybe shims, maybe glue.

it’s really not that much to do, so i think i’ll work on it next. it should at least be more pleasant than the total rewiring of the Double Jet.

i need to test the fingerboard grain filler i ordered for the Höfner neck to see whether it gets an acceptable result. it seemed awfully light on the Kondor repairs to work on darker wood.

trying to finish off the Kondor body repairs. just needs the lacquer pen now. i also need to relevel the pickups and balance the outputs.

[dubkitty]

here's the more visibly damaged (though the less damaged in toto) of the two areas after several coats with the paint marker. it would be easier to get a good surface with a brush, because when you get enough lacquer on the tip to flow well the excess runs off down the face of the guitar. alcohol and paper towels on standby got used several times. this isn't perfect, but it's better. i'm pleased that the color-matching thing seems less problematic here, probably because i covered so much territory with the pen. i just did more lacquer this morning. once it dries i'll do the painting on the other side, let that dry, and then work out a final finishing strategy. i'm hoping that light sanding with 1200 followed by polishing compound will give me a decent surface...i did several passes to try and build up a sandable layer of paint because a single application of the pen is very thin. if i can just get a reasonably consistent flat surface i'll be happy.

i more or less solved the problem of the hole in the Kondor logo from the misplaced string tree...i went through a J. Peterman catalog, which features watercolor illustrations of the products rather than photographs, found an illo with a clouded sky in the background that pretty much matched the pale blue color, and used clearcoat to stick it down. while i was at it i did a second coat on the sticker which made it nicer and brought out the colors a bit more. i'll do a third coat later on before i stop. you can see the fix close-up, but from three feet away it's invisible. i'm a bit hacked off that i had to do string trees. the staggered tuners would have worked on almost any other neck without aid, but the Hondo headstock actually tilts towards the bridge which i only noticed today. go figure. i guess they saved 4 yen on wood.

i'm going to try disconnecting the tone control and having the circuit go pickups->rotary selector->varitone->volume->out. or maybe the volume ahead of the tone switch. i still have the instruction sheet. i've heard Waterslide demos of guitars using the DiPinto varitone like mine with much better results, so i'm not quite willing to just chuck it and get a Tonestyler. yet. that can wait, though...i'm not turning a screw till the finish repairs are done.

[dubkitty]

it struck me yesterday that the Jetstar might be close enough to the Firebird sound to cover that option. another thing that needs exploring. i've really been hacking away at the Pickups I Want list...i did some demo listens and decided that Burns Tri-Sonics, gold foil pickups, and the big Guild Thayil HB-2s aren't for me. all that's left are the Mojo Bigsby pickups, real CuNiFe WRHBs, '69 Strat, and the weird Gemini pickups combo for my special Telecaster. the WRHB and CS69 guitars could easily be Squier or Fender donor bodies with brain transplants, and the Bigsby Supro thing shouldn't be horrifically bad. the Gemini Tele will probably be a ground-up thing because i want really specific things (double bound body, green ideally, mahogany neck with rosewood board) that FMIC doesn't sell together. but it's a Tele, so it can only get so complicated. and i've built a parts Tele before.

i'm stalking two single-pickup Supros as donors for the Bigsby project, but am trying to wait until i have cash in hand rather than doing deferred payments. first i need to actually have the guitar in hand so i know whether to get the tall or short versions of the pickups, then i'll have to install them, figure out the wiring (which should be dead simple since it's basically Tele wiring), get the Bigsby bridge, and add a Bigsby. i'll also have to wait until the guitar is actually here to see if my old B6 will fit or if it's too long as i rather suspect. but i shouldn't have to refinish anything, or repair stuff that's fucked up. i'm going to order the GluBoost Fill & Finish for the Jetstar this week; the replacement anchors are on the way.

[dubkitty]

i worked on the Kondor body some more…the problem with the lacquer pen is that it doesn’t smooth down when it dries. it’s kind of like painting with blood in that it doesn’t want to stay together. sanding and polishing doesn’t smooth it because it’s a thin layer and you go through it before it’s flat. my first idea was to use the clear gloss lacquer pen to cover the work, but it melts the black pen and screws it up. so i tried the water-based clear poly and eureka! one side dried so nicely that i only had to polish out the points where it ended and the original finish began. for whatever reason the other side did not, but the poly stands up to sanding better than the lacquer. you can see places in the second photo where it got down to primer or whatever though the biggest light spots there are reflections from the living room lights...note that the large spots are in more or less the same place/relative position on both sides. i'll pick those off with the pen. i’m considering one more pass of poly on the problematic side, after which the big body fixes should be done. it’s not perfect—you can still feel grain texture on the parts that were splintered and filled—but the color is fairly consistent and i managed to retain a good radius on the edges that got redone. i'm really proud of the contours. lots and lots of sanding there before finishing.

i also readjusted the pickup polepieces since they weren’t quite right after adjusting the pickups so they were level to the guard and neck heel and going up to .011-.048 strings. have i mentioned lately that i really like pickups whose only adjustment is for overall height like Fenders and the Davoli reissues because there's only so much twiddling you can do with them? the next things to do are pulling the pickguard to rewire it without the tone control in hope that it’ll improve the performance of the varitone, and using polishing compound on the entire body which has never been done. theoretically after that i can put it back together, do the neck relief/bridge height/intonation, and it should be done. and not a moment too soon…the tailpiece anchors for the Jetstar arrive Saturday and i still haven’t done the Hopf nut. i'll have to wait to do the finishing stuff on the Jetstar till another pay cycle because the GluBoost tints are pretty expensive, but i can do the playability stuff, fixing the Stetsbar mount and filing down that pesky 2d fret that got screwed up because that's where the neck break occurred.

i’m stalking a Supro on eBay hoping i can snipe it for less than the $375-500 they usually go for. we’ll see.

at some point soon i need to get myself out of Projects Mode and more into Playing Mode, but since i'm kind of on a roll here i may as well boogie with it.

[dubkitty]

did one more coat of poly clear on the side of the body i had to sand, and i think this should do it. the great thing about water-based poly is that it acts like water, i.e. if flows rather than streaks. it’s going onto my list of guitar hackery essentials.

[dubkitty]

since the Kondor needs to sit until the clearcoat dries i worked on adjustments to the Jetstar. i guess when i got it i adjusted the pickups to be as hot as possible, so when i plugged it into the Princeton which was on its normal settings it was hella loud. i always try to have my guitars in a fairly narrow loudness band so there aren’t problems with the effects or recording/mixing, so i got out the Wandré, which is nice and loud while fitting into my loudness band, and alternated plugging each guitar in while dialing down the Jetstar’s bridge pickup until it was roughly as loud as the Wandré’s. then i did the polepieces for the pickup, after which i did the same leveling on the neck pickup to match it to the bridge pickup’s level. the pickups are still plenty snappy after being backed down two full turns of the screws. there’s not a lot more i can do with it yet…there’s no point in trying to do intonation or bridge height because the whole assembly has to come off when the anchors are replaced. so i’m putting it up until it’s time to really do the difficult stuff.

[dubkitty]

the Kondor is just about done. since i needed to take the pickguard off to remove the tone control, i also pulled the tremolo and went over the body with polishing compound. unfortunately taking out the tone control only helped the varitone slightly if at all; the first 2 positions aren't too rolled off compared to the bypass, but the others are way too quiet to be useable. i guess i'll get a Tonestyler when i've gotten through some of the other project spending.

i cleaned up the nut a bit and did some black lacquer pen near it to make that part of the headstock less sloppy, and then went over that with the poly clearcoat. while i was about it i also did a fourth coat on the sticker, which is now pretty shiny. i'd probably have to sand it off now. i had everything buttoned up when the volume knob started cutting out, so off everything came again. there was a bit of wire coming off one of the terminals that was shorting the pot to ground, fixed easily enough. other than that the soldering really wasn't bad, just cutting the wires that connected the tone knob and splicing them together. everything's back together now except that the strings are still out of the tuners because i'm not going to tune it up until the clearcoat dries and i can't screw it up. i did some preliminary neck relief and bridge height adjustments earlier and will dial those in later. filed a couple of the bridge slots that weren't making good contact and they're fine now. once it's restrung and set up i'm genuinely going to be done except for maybe replacing the varitone with a Tonestyler somewhere down the line. photos once everything's set up.

[dubkitty]

[dubkitty]

[dubkitty]

next thing is doing the Hopf nut.

[dubkitty]

the Hopf nut wasn’t really any trouble at all. the StewMac nut slotting files are the bomb. i could probably go a bit lower but don’t want to overdo it and fuck up the nut. i’ve also been using the clear gloss lacquer marker to stabilize the areas where the paint has worn away. there’s really nothing else to do with it. i’m going to test the polishing compound on the Galaxiemaster body…it would be awfully nice if it took down the orange-peel surface texture without hours of sanding before polishing. i’m not getting my hopes up, though. the Jetstar tailpiece anchors arrive tomorrow, but won’t get installed until Sunday because i’ll be over at Becky’s without the guitar or the necessary tools. i’m excited by the fact that i’m now down to 3 active projects: the Jetstar, Double Jet, and Galaxiemaster in order of difficulty. i’d really like to get them done, hoping they’ll all be finished this year.

[dubkitty]