scott from _actual time_

actually, many if not most locking trem guitars were built this way in the mid-late 80s before ibanez pioneered the recessed trem routing. the mid 80s charvels and jacksons had angled necks and non-recessed trems so you could pull back plenty, and many 80s Kramers had tall necks that weren't angled, but you could still crank the trem up some before it hit the body. the only locking trem guitars purposely built to have the trems dive only that i know of are EVH's guitars. going back even before the Floyd existed and he used non-locking Strat trems, he's always had the back of the trem resting on the guitar body or with a quarter wedged between them.

feedback is caused by the sound coming out of the speakers making the pickup or microphone vibrate. the pickup picks up that vibration as noise and pumps it back into the amp, making a loop. if the pickup windings are loose, the pickup can be more prone to feedback, and this is what wax potting can fix. high gain amp settings are also worse, especially with lots of treble dialed in or the 'toe' end of a wah pedal sweep. that's probably why your feedback diminishes when you turn the guitar volume knob down -- you're reducing the gain of the signal going out of the guitar into the amp. this kind of feedback sounds like a banshee or ringwraith screaming -- really high pitched. bagginssssssss! the pickup can also vibrate if the mounting isn't really tight. to test this, get the pickup feeding back and then grab it really tightly between your thumb and finger. if the feedback stops, then the problem is in the mounting, not in the windings. this kind of feedback is usually a lower pitch, more a ghostly moan than a ringwraith. most pickup mounting is just designed to hold the pickup there and not to immobilize it, so you may need to tweak things to get the feedback to stop. i've stuffed les paul type humbucker cavities with foam to immobilize the pickups, and some mounting rings and pickups have more than 2 screws so the pickup isn't as wobbly. you could also try adding stiffer or longer springs to the pickup mounting screws.

With just the Deep-C on? Yes. then i'm sold! the allen screw on the Deep-C would be fine for me. the dive-only setting would be how i'd keep the guitar all the time, and if i ever needed full-float in the studio it'd be no problem to whip out an allen wrench. i'd never want to change in the middle of a gig or anything. cool -- i looked for set screws like that but just didn't see them.

thanks! good to be here, especially since i'm planning to start building bodies again after an 8-year layoff. lots of very cool discussion here. and i've been looking for a way to dive-only my floating trems for over 10 years -- i like the recessed route, so the trem is parallel to the body and the neck doesn't have to be angled, but i never pull up on the bar. i'd rather have the extra sustain and everything stay in tune when a string breaks that a dive-only setup has. like EVH has been doing since day 1. if the Tremol-no could do all that and still be so easily convertable back and forth, i'd be sold. i got to thinking that had to be the case. how solid is that Deep-C clamp? i.e., after thorough setup of the Tremol-no, can you lift the guitar up by the bar and still have it stay in tune, not pulling back at all? another question for you, from that RG pic: what keeps the Tremol-no spring claw from sliding up the spring claw screws? if it slid up those screws, the bridge would not lock. are those holes through the Tremol-no claw threaded?

i was saying that dimensions are not totally irrelevant for guitar cabs, but they aren't a big deal. my 2x12 that is 25" W x 14" H x 11" D does not sound as big as that vertical one in the pic that is 30" x 17.5" x 16", but the exact value of the inner volume doesn't matter for the raw frequencies of guitar speakers. even in ported guitar cabs, which are rare but Bogner and other folks make them, you can just build the box and then tune your port by slowly trimming length from the port until it accentuates the frequency you want. you can also stuff a cab with pillow stuffing to slow down the sound waves inside and make it "act" as though it were bigger. i dunno, because i don't! if you want to build a Theile cab or any other specific band-pass (ported) design, you will want to crunch the numbers, but guitar is so raw that the details don't matter as much as the general or "loose" qualities of the cab, IMO.

i've built over a dozen speaker cabs for guitar in the last 10 years or so -- here's a vertical 2x12 i just finished: http://www.his.com/~sha3u/gear/2x12v.jpg (the corners were in the mail!). if you're handy, it's easy to build a detuned cab that is fully functional, and how much money or work you put in beyond that just determines how fancy it is. you'll have several decisions to make before you start -- what size speakers, and do you want them mounted on the back of the baffle board like in marshall or recto cabs, or mounted through the front like the older boogie cabs and many others? a very subtle ear can detect tonal differences between these mounting styles, but i can't remember what they claim the differences are. what cab dimensions, and open back or closed? for this, it's best to copy the general design from a cab you like the sound of. for example, if you want a chunky metal tone, you want a closed back cab like marshall and the rectos. if you want a brighter Fender tone, open back. dimensions aren't so hard and fast, and bigger is always better -- that 2x12 that is 16" deep because that's the height of the trunk of my car! then you can get to construction details like materials -- voidless birch ply makes great cabs, but you can do just as well with regular pine ply, pine shelfboard, or even mdf. you can cover the cab with fuzzy carpet or tolex using contact cement, or for a cheap gigging box you can just paint it black. lots of places sell amp corners and handles and casters. the thing to remember with guitar cabs is that they're way less high-fi than PA cabs or even bass cabs. loose dimensions are important, but you're not tuning the box to bandpass a specific frequency or anything, so you don't need to calculate interior volume and all that stuff they do for PA cabs.

i'd buy a half-dozen of them if it'll do dive only.

yes, i think that would work, because what you'd be doing is wiring it like righty and then turning the switch around. you could also not turn the switch and wire it as mirror image, both of those are going to be equivalent i think. as always with wiring, try it out to see if it works, and if it doesn't, go back to the drawing board and try something else!

that is exactly what you want to do, for the volume and tone pots at least -- you need to have the wires mirrored and the terminals different in order to make the knobs turn the right way for a left-handed player. mirroring the 5-way switch is probably the way to go as well, give it a shot and see. www's diagram does not look left-handed to me, it looks like a view from the underside of the pickguard. the right-handed wiring would look different if the picture was drawn from the the bottom vs. the top, even though in 3D it's not different. and if you're shielding the whole guitar, i'd go ahead and shield the Strat jack cavity as well. if you're having noise problems, and/or if you're using lots of single coils, it can only help.

you're right -- Strage Fruit's diagram is not completely correct. the two swoopy red arrows connecting the top and bottom poles are not connections that a DPDT switch will make, unless you did bridge the pins with a wire jumper.

you mean a standard wall-mount flippy lightswitch? seems to me that'd be a huge pain to mount in a guitar, requiring a large routed cavity. the pole screws are also designed to accept much larger wire gauges than guitar wire. theoretically it should function just fine. i like to wire kill switches as a break in a new ground wire connected to the hot. you might get some hum just by breaking the hot output with the kill switch, but you'll get none if you wire the kill switch to ground out the hot.

you ever see those big electric switches on the wall in horror movies, that dr frankenstien throws to active his monster, or that the warden throws to fire up the electric chair? they have two upper poles, two poles in the middle connected to the swiveling U-bracket with the handle, and two bottom poles. when dr frankenstein throws the switch, it breaks the connection of each middle pole to its corresponding top pole, and connects each of those middles to the corresponding bottom pole. that's on/on. if the good doctor stopped in the middle of throwing the switch, and the middle poles weren't connected to anything, that's on/off/on. and on/on/on is if he only threw one half of the switch down, so in the middle position one of the top poles is connected to middle and one of the bottom ones is. there's usually a notch in the switch that specifies which sides are active in the middle "half on" position, since if you think about it both possible orientations of the switch are not the same. mwuh-ha-ha-ha-ha!

on my Rg7620, the depth of the back of the recess for the Lo-Pro 7 is about 18 mm from the face of the guitar. the bottom of that cavity is lined with a rubber pad, so the surface of the wood is probably another 2 mm lower. i couldn't measure from the ledge where the mounting studs are, since the trem is sitting in the cavity. the trem cavity on my old 1991 540S7 is much deeper and much longer toward the strap button. personally, i'd remove the absolute minimum necessary to operate the trem, to preserve as much tonewood as possible.

uhh... .\||/ but yes, the radial arm saw is for speaker cabs and square things. it might be useful to carve an archtop, by tweaking the saw depth and making dozens of parallel passes, but i can't hink of any other guitar body application. once the meticulous carving of the template is done, the routing is easy. i've been making 7 string pickup templates, and now i have a nice 2x6 scrap that has a DiMarzio Blaze Neck direct mounted in it!

sorry to dredge up an old thread, but i just found this forum in links from jemsite.com . i've built a few guitars, a dozen speaker cabs, and i've designed lots of insanely complex coil cut wiring schemes. i'm just gearing up to build some 7 string bodies, so i'm having a blast reading all the old threads. the best 7 string single coils i've tried are the Rio Grande Muy Grande model. they are ~$80 each, so way less than Duncan Custom Shop. they have huge pole pieces and they get a great 'pushed' phat SRV single coil type tone. they sound way better than the flat tone of the DiMarzio Blaze (II) singles. Rio Grande is a cool bunch of folks, they'll custom wind their singles in RW/RP to hum cancel in the middle positions, and they also make a lower output 7 string single. google 'em. the Rio Grande singles do have the 'extended' baseplate sticking out of the back of the pickup, unlike the DiMarzios, so you will have to route for that, or chisel out the back wall of the single coil cavity. i did this on my old beater Ibanez 540S7 and they sound fantastic in that thin mahogany.