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soapbarstrat

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Everything posted by soapbarstrat

  1. soapbarstrat
    A trick some classical builders do, is cram an ebony strip into a channel in the neck, but the channel is actually just a little shorter than the strip. This creates a back-bowing tension on the neck when unstrung and helps keep the neck from being string tension's bitch when strung up. Probably not a good enough method for steel strings. Plus that .048" low E is not what I would call light. Plus your high action is going to allow string tension to put more relief into the neck; works more like a bow that way.
  2. soapbarstrat
    If it was mine, taking the bridge completely apart and cleaning it would be a must. I prefer used guitars, but want no part of someone elses gunk on them. As for the G string problem, if there's no clamping problem at either end, it's hard to say. G strings are often the first to have problems on any guitar. Might help when you reassemble the bridge to put some graphite grease on the fulcrum points (part of the two posts where the bridge base-plate bear against all the time). Quite likely on a bridge that old that there's debris down in the square holes of the saddles, keeping the string from getting clamped nicely.
  3. soapbarstrat
    And you'll gulp it straight ONCE (like I did), cause 190 proof is certainly where the term "fire water" came from. Perhaps a little too legal here. Like a 20 minute run from bottling plant to the liquor store within walking distance.
  4. soapbarstrat
    I've never been so devastated about not having a digital camera until now. Tell ya what, I'm going to hire a court room sketch artist to do a nice drawing of all my dried up bottles of CA, and I'll even have him/her add a nice Japanese garden in the background.
  5. soapbarstrat
    Yeah, I agree. Sounds like you lucked out. Funny thing was that I was offered USA Jacksons at that time. So guys were willing to let Jacksons go, but not Charvels. I was living in San Francisco, so even the guys working at the Guitar Center were regular gigging musicians. I remember one guy ( a GC employee) offering to sell me me his whole fleet of Jacksons, 'cause ESP was going nuts giving free guitars to just about every club gigging player at the time in the area. But I wasn't the biggest Jackson fan for some reason.
  6. soapbarstrat
    If there's cutaways, I assume you'll be re-gluing one or two thin lips of wood at the ends of the neck pocket when they get blown out by the expanding neck. Don't get too caught up on the neck fitting every area of the pocket so extremely tight. On a glued neck, you need some room for glue. On a bolt-on, you've got it going on with the flat parts of the heel and pocket fitting firmly together. And you can even try a Walter Wright (He's a guitar repairman) trick of loosening the neck mounting bolts with the guitar strung up, so you have that 180 pounds (or whatever it is ? ) of string tension pulling the neck toward the bridge end of the neck pocket and then retightening the mounting bolts.
  7. soapbarstrat
    Everybody's favorite game : 'I'm drunk on Friday night, but can I still operate a scanner ? ' Here. (PSW's looks better)
  8. soapbarstrat
    Yes, naptha is a good general solvent for stuff like this (along with an old worn out toothbrush). If you're going to strip the trem apart, it would be a good idea to measure saddle positions with calipers to make the reassembly go a little faster. And of course best to do any parts soaking with the hardware taken off the guitar. USA or Japanese ? I made $800 over the summer in '84 and was set on buying a used USA Charvel, but right around then, Charvel owners became reluctant to sell, so I was out of luck.
  9. soapbarstrat
    Sure, get yourself a special oven that removes all oxygen, so you can heat the piece of wood (not a shaped neck) at 700 degrees without it burning. Suhr still puts a coat of urethane on them. Not a gimmick if it's true that you only have to adjust the t-rod for your set-up preference and then don't have to touch that adjustment nut again. or at least very rarely and it stays right on the money. Again, keep your already shaped neck out of the microwave oven, off the barbeque grill top, etc
  10. soapbarstrat
    Used to be that when you'd buy a 3/16" thick Wilkinson roller nut, it would come with a truss rod cover with 4 rollers just like you positioned them, except on the Wilkinson, the rollers were a little closer to the nut. Can't find a pic online, but there's a pic in the 90's StewMac catalogs.
  11. soapbarstrat
    If you happen to be a huge Genuine Dunlop fan, I've got a batch I wouldn't mind moving out for what I paid for it. You can certainly find better deals on wire made by other companies. I have 30 feet of Dunlop 6100 that I'd take $50.00 for (includes USPS Priority shipping) It's 15 pieces of 2 foot straight lengths. Would also require US Postal money-order as payment.
  12. soapbarstrat
    I switched to pressing before I was even half way to mastering hammering, so I'm not the best person to ask what's the best radius for the wire, but I'm pretty sure I did some decent hammer jobs with a combination similar to what you have there. Hammering has more of an "art" to it than pressing, so what works best for one guy, might not be what works best for another. I wasted a lot of fret-wire in my early days, trying this and that. And I didn't keep notes of everything like I should have.
  13. soapbarstrat
    Hammering or pressing ? A generous over-bend is good for most hammering methods. For pressing, you want a fairly close match. I don't go too crazy about it, but lets say the board was 12". I'd want my wire (I just typed 'wife' instead of 'wire' haha) between 12 and 13 (notice how I left the " off, haha again). There's always the question " well if they do pop up, do I want it to happen in the middle or the ends ? ". And if you're doing the job for a customer, the answer is easy : you'd rather have the middle pop up, because popped ends can mean a cut hand = potential lawsuit. But I try to leave the wire radius a close match to avoid popping anywhere and since I use glue, I'm not trying to be clever with the barbs pushing sideways at the ends to help hold them down (which is so freakin' unreliable on a refret anyway)
  14. soapbarstrat
    I wonder if it's normal/ok if everytime you swallow, there's a light pop in your ears, 'cause I have that. Actually when I don't get that slight pop, my ears feel like somethings wrong.
  15. soapbarstrat
    I would never use the .002" tolerance or better over 2 feet type stuff for something like that (don't think it would keep the precision edge to that degree). Something more like a .005" tolerance. Cheapest(I mean, it better be free) I know of is laminate flooring scrap (put a want-ad on craigslist). Yeah, a weird "stepped edge" with each edge being less than 1/8" thick but my precision grounds show it's a pretty precise edge. If you could just get the bit's bearing to stay on that narrow edge for one pass, you could make a fatter edged guide onto another piece.
  16. soapbarstrat
    I think technique, attitude and personality can over-ride "great tone", or in another words, one guy's tone can suck, but everything else comes out and knocks your socks off, or at least makes you want to keep listening. Another guys got the whole "holy grail" rig at his disposal, but nothing magical to go through that rig.
  17. soapbarstrat
    Playing cards ? I missed that one. I have seen playing cards mentioned as a good shim material for router table fences and stuff like that, but never to put glue around. Teflon is the best. But what works just about as well is HDPE plastic. I get mine off of these If you have a pair of calipers, you can usually find a small section around .020" thick. Gap packed with wood dust, then soaked with CA is the best fill, to me. Certainly the fastest. Usually kicks off so fast, you can file the hardened fill flush within minutes, if not seconds. Erlewine had a similar thing happened like what happened to you, in one of his videos. I think it was a match book cover he coated with wax, for a fret-slot damn. Couldn't get that bastard out and had to use a razor saw.
  18. soapbarstrat
    Quite a few places, but you didn't give the slightest clue on your location. And you didn't say if there's an exact radius you want, and you didn't say what length you want the wire. Most of the coils I have are around a 8 to 10 inch radius, but I can easily change the radius of the wire, even to a flatter radius. I once walked into Gary Brawer's shop and asked for some Dunlop 6000. He pulls out a big coil and I go " Oh wow, it's already radiused " And then he goes " Yeah, but not enough". And I thought, what the hell is he talking about, he doesn't even know I'm putting it on a 16" radius board and his coil had a radius somewhere between 8 and 12 inches. Of course it was bent enough. I used to hear the weirdest stuff from repair guys and it kept me from letting them work on my guitar.
  19. soapbarstrat
    It's subtle, but I think the fret height influences the tone of the guitar, or maybe sustain is more what I mean. I notice a more woody tone on lower frets and more hi-fi metallic tone on huge frets. I have at least 8 sizes of fret-wire and the option anxiety for refrets on my own guitars never goes away. I keep putting off refrets on most because of this. I probably should settle on the .095 wide by .046 tall. I think that's what my rear-rout 80's Fender had and I wailed like a son-of-a-bitch on that guitar. I'd play a Dokken tape and solo over the rhythm part and although I wasn't doing George Lynch note for note, half what I was doing was as good as what he was doing on the solo parts. I was practicing like a bastard too, compared to my pathetic noodling these days.
  20. soapbarstrat
    Feel like the ultimate broken record, but like I've probably said 100 times, when in doubt, go with something .045" to .048" tall and .080" to .100" wide. And then there's the whole wire quality issue which is actually more important. StewMac good, Jescar better, Luthier suppliers selling Jescar = same as Jescar (Duh !) Others can take over on the SS vs NS. And you will use your hair to buff the frets, right ?
  21. soapbarstrat
    Comfortable with building, but just lazy. Half way through something, I start losing interest and got my eye on something else. Way too many damn options. Heck, I still want to build and see how I like the Way Huge Red LLama. Found two of those hex inverter chips. One in an old phone another on a computer motherboard. What about the Keeley compressor, does that fatten the tone ?
  22. soapbarstrat
    The tube-screamer I built went a little too far with adding fatness. I couldn't take it anymore. I guess I'm a sucker for a little more note separation. I know when I was playing it, the whole time, I was like DAMN, this is THE TONE I was trying to get in the 80's and now when I finally got it, it's just not my thing anymore. It's all a big, never ending experimental jig-saw puzzle. Even worse than the tube screamer was the Hughes and Kettner " cream machine". Imagine your guitar and amp taking a deep nose-dive into a large swimming pool full of grease.
  23. soapbarstrat
    Oh ok Drak, I lied. All those alder strats with the bridge buckers on countless records (I'm thinking mainly 80's metal, you know Lynch, Di Martini, Vito Bratta, etc) just didn't cut it for a meaty tone. Man were those guys dumb, considering a meaty tone is what everyone was going for. Yeah, change the body wood, certainly easier than a pickup swap or adding effects. Now, this is probably all too argumentative for ya, but from my side it's all about ' hold on, let's not get carried away '. My main point is that if his rig doesn't have what it takes to make alder sound meaty, it doesn't have what it takes to make other woods sound meaty either.
  24. soapbarstrat
    Just a different look. You do mean the little individual "trenches" under each allen bolt, right ?
  25. soapbarstrat
    If we're going to suggest the subtle difference between 2 hard woods, then you could also say the single output tube amp isn't going to be meaty enough either. What's Brad Gillis' old red strat made of ? Way into meaty territory. Mattias Jabbs of the Scorpions has often used an alder strat with bridge bucker. Heck I could make a long list of others. And what about the speakers in those epi cabs ? I have no experience with those particular epi speakers, but they play a huge part. Are the cabs closed back ? Outside of an amp, speaker, effects change, the pickup swap should make a significant difference.
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