crafty

Go down to Sears and grab a Screw-Out set. It'll be easier than drilling the broken screws out, especially if you don't have a drill press. Next time, drill the pilots a little bigger, use quality SS screws, and rub a bar of soap on the threads to lube 'em up.

$20/hr. I don't think that's too much to ask for something that takes a little skill with a soldering iron and a set of feeler gauges. At most, he's out $40 if you're slow, which is much less than any music store will charge for that kind of service.

Aw, man! Larsen went to BMMG? Sure 'nuff, I move away from OKC and Guitar Center, MARS, and BMMG move in and shut down all the good shops! On topic, some junkyards won't let anyone take seat belts, especially the buckles. They just either shred them with the car or cut them up. They're a big liability if someone installs them in a car and gets killed in a wreck because the belt broke from being stretched in a previous accident. At most surplus stores or quality camping outlets you can get 2 inch nylon webbing. Double back and stitch the ends, add straplocks, and you're good to go!

Parker uses solid spruce for the Fly Artist, Nylon, and Bronze guitars.

??? Never heard of that one, although I'll ask one of my friends who has more of a specialty in patent law. A good way to help your trademark/dress case would be to engage in interstate commerce with your product. It can be as simple as sending a purchased item to a friend in another state as long as they give you money for it. That may be where you're getting the idea of mailing a letter to your attorney. A certified mail receipt is pretty tough to be considered as evidence proving the date of your idea because it doesn't prove the date of the document inside the envelope, only the date the envelope was mailed somewhere. You could have mailed envelopes out to people and stuffed them later, you know?

Well, I think you may be better off taking your guitar to a pro for a good setup. It sounds to me like you've run out of adjustment in the saddles for the A and D string. It's a pretty common thing for the D string, the simplest fix is usually just to take the bridge apart, turn the saddles for the A and D strings 180 degrees, and reassemble. That should give you another millimeter or two of adjustment to properly intonate the strings. Again, if you're not really familiar with how it goes together, I'd definitely take it to a pro. I'd walk you through it but I have no idea how those saddles are held in on your particular bridge. Usually it's either one long clip or little retaining clips for each saddle.

Time to post a new sign in this thread: Please Don't Feed the Trolls

LK, the problem I have is that I've seen this guy posting for the last week or so such ridiculous nonsense that's wasting everyone's time. In some posts he plays the part of a newbie who doesn't know anything about guitars, in others he plays the part of an expert sage who knows everything and more than God about how poorly constructed everyone's guitars are. I truly believe that all of this is just one big troll who's trying to get people's reactions to his sometimes ridiculous and sometimes offensive banter. PM's about this aren't successful if no one else in the group sees what's really going on here. Seriously, take another look at his posts on this thread and compare them to his "Lightwave" thread. It's insanity.

Hey, that's a nice looking guitar! Anyway, you'll need to measure the distance between the posts that hold the bridge. Once you've done that, just go to some place like StewMac and pick out which one you like. They even have one with piezos in it so you can rig up an acoustic-electric setup as well. Be forewarned, though, that while most of these bridges will have the same post spacing as what you already have, you may need to enlarge the holes in your guitar or fill them to drill new smaller holes. If you could tell us more about your intonation problems, maybe we could help you without you having to replace the whole bridge, too. I'd be willing to bet what you already have is a decent korean Gotoh bridge. Some other upgrades I may suggest are locking tuners and real active EMG pickups. They are worlds better than the EMG-HZs. As far as the nut goes, you should be able to gently pry it off with a small screwdriver. Finding and fitting a brass nut could be a little tougher, though. I've never seen ready-made brass nuts for a Jackson neck, so you may have to find a block of raw brass and make your own. Just glue it back in place with a small dab of epoxy.

Yeah, mixing active and passive components is a pain, with maybe mixing piezos and magnetics as the exception. The bad thing is you'll spend a lot of dough trying to mix both active and passive premium hardware and it winds up making your premium hardware sound like $20 MightyMite pickups. EMGs are good pickups. I love the SA set in my Strat. Give their Tele set a try. If you don't like 'em, just sell 'em. Chances are if you aren't playing anything too heavy, and I mean heavy, you may actually like their single-coil Tele bridge pickup. It has some pretty good punch, just about the same as a passive 'bucker, with a nice sweet high end.

You're right, I couldn't hold back. But since you've tried 5,000 guitars and still haven't found a good one, I guess you must really be older than me to have accomplished such a feat.

Don't worry, I already have... I'm pretty sure I'm probably a little older and a little more experienced than you are. Your problem is the fact that you take up everyone's bandwidth and time with what seem to be posts intended to get people to respond to ridiculous subjects. If that's not forum trolling I don't know what is.

I smell a Troll in the forum...

I really wish this site was like Slashdot so we could mod stuff as 'Flamebait' with zero points... Optical pickups are nothing new. They've been around for a while for basses and such. The problem is that your so-called perfection is pure hype. No pickup system is perfect. For all intents and purposes, piezo pickups could be considered "perfect" because they can pick up vibrations outside of the human audial envelope even better than the best optical pickup. The problem is they sound harsh and boomy unless you put them through some sort of preamp equalization process. Optical pickups are going to be the same way. They aren't going to sound like traditional magnetic pickups, which is the sound most people want, and you're going to have to spend a hell of a lot of money and time trying to get them to sound like magnetic pickups rather than just going out and buying a Les Paul. If you want to make music with a guitar synth, go for it. But don't call others close-minded simply because they want nothing to do with an unproven system that isn't going to give them anything they really needed, anyway. I'm starting to get a vision of your guitar as a flat piece of graphite with an optical bridge/pickup setup, untapered neck, no truss rod, fanned frets, no nut, and some kind of reinvention of the Steinberger or LSR tuners. And it's still going to sound and play like a piece of crap nobody wants. Ned Steinberger already went through this in the '80s, don't follow his path!! BTW, modeling amps sound like crap. Might as well just get a Flock of Seagulls hairdo and learn how to play a whole song with one finger on the keyboard.

I'm just curious, has anyone actually seen or played one of these 513 guitars outside of NAMM? Seriously, I can find PRS Customs, CEs, Santanas, and even the occasional McCarty, but I haven't found a music store yet that's ponied up the dough for a $6,000 guitar.

Lace pickups sound pretty good. Fender was the exclusive user of Lace pickups for years with the Deluxe, Ultra, and Artist Strats and Teles. A lot of the sig guitars have switched over to the new Fender Noiseless pickups, but a few like the James Burton Tele still use the Laces. Any recording made by Clapton between 1988 and 2000 should have the Lace sound to it. I have a feeling that the "proprietary" technology behind the 513 system was designed either by Lace or Seymour Duncan.

I just did that. Guess what? They're almost the same, just a millimeter or two different. Why is that? Because Leo Fender invented the individually adjustable saddle Strat trem more than fifty years ago! It was designed to not only compensate for the minute differences in string length due to the neck taper, but also the differences in string gauge and tuning. The saddles on my intonated guitar form an almost perfect "C" if you're looking straight on at the bridge. Your use of the pythgorean theorem is commendable, but totally negated in this case because you can adjust the saddles to compensate for the neck taper's effect on intonation. So here's the question you should answer next, why do angled, or fanned, fret guitars need bridges with more individual saddle adjustment if, according to you, they don't need them?

Seems to me like you could get a similar setup by using a couple of Lace Sensor Duallys and a single Lace Sensor in the middle. The Duallys aren't normal humbuckers, they're two independent single coils mounted next to each other so you can have two SC pickups in the same spot, similar to the 513 system. I wonder if you could set it up with the Lace Duallys in the bridge and neck, and a Fernandes single-coil Sustainer in the middle. I'm just wondering if the Sustainer driver would still be able to function properly in the mid rather than the neck position.

Why should they give you a corner of valuable shop space when you have no product to showcase? Why would they sell your product when they can either get the real deal from FCS or Suhr or use the space to sell more cheapo Austins, Samicks, and Epis? The point I think everyone's trying to make is that if you want to do this, it must become a part of your soul. Boutique builders don't just wake up one morning and say, "Well, I know how to use these power tools, and I'm pretty sure I know everything about building guitars, so I'm going to go build a guitar and sell it for $3000". It's going to take you years to get to the point where you can build a consistently reliable and high-quality instrument. I hate to say it, but I'm beginning to smell a troll. These posts just seem too out of sorts to be real.

The custom pickups and control configuration are going to be responsible for the biggest differences in tone between an American Series and the EJ Signature. The trem, paint, and pickup cavity mods are going to have the least impact. What I thought was interesting is how the EJ Strat has a 12 inch radius with the modern medium-jumbo frets. Looks like EJ was looking to get some better playability compared to his old '54-'57 Strats. Fluke, if you want some free advice, don't go into the custom Strat business. A few months ago you started posting about buying Saga kits, painting them, and selling them for hundreds of dollars even though you knew nothing about guitar construction. I seriously doubt you have the skills or know-how to create custom guitars that are anywhere near the level of a Braun or a Suhr. Take a look at the Polls section where Stew is having trouble selling his custom Strats--and he even knows what he's doing! Build a few guitars first and see if you really have the skills. Then build a few more and see if you're getting better, first.

Yeah, it's called a piece of wood wedged between the trem block and the body of the guitar Or you could just purchase a Tremol-No and have the freedom and flexibility to use the trem whenever you want and essentially block the trem whenever you want. If only you could actually *purchase* one, though. When is it going to come out, Kevan?

The JB is designed for the bridge and the '59 for the neck. You may be able to switch out the pickups for ones with covers but you'll probably have to pay a little extra for the covered units. As far as using the setup for rock, Dave Mustaine seems to do pretty well with that setup.

Seymour Duncan Classic and Hot Stacks have the polepieces going all the way through both coils to the baseplate. They sound wonderful, too.

So true. People don't understand that EMG pickups alone won't make you sound like Kirk and James. 90% of the sound comes from the player, 10% from the guitar, effects, and studio. Look at Megadeth. Dave's able to get a pretty righteous tone out of his Duncan JB/Jazz and JB/'59 combos. Dimebag had some pretty good tones coming out of his passive pickups, too. One thing I do like about EMGs is how clean the signal is if you are using processors downstream. They have very little noise injected into the signal coming from the guitar, so the end result is a much better sound out of the processors and into the amp.

I hate SMT now that I don't have access to a Pace rework station I still like Marshalls, but like everything else, you gotta be choosy about which ones you buy and how you take care of 'em. Mesa, Soldano, Genz Benz, and Rivera kick a$$, but sooner or later they're going to be like Marshall and set up everything for massive mass production and endorsement deals rather than quality sound and legendary reliability. But give me an old JCMSlash or 1987 Silver Jubilee and I'll rebuild it as often as necessary to keep it going...