teknohippy

True craftmanship Mr.Choi. One day I'm sure you'll reach your dream of making a living from building and selling guitars. Then you could give up programming, make guitars instead and spend more time with your family

LOL. The irony

There's not a great amount area on the contact points of cat5 not so mention wiring decent screened cable to a cat5 plug would be not that simple. They are wired using a tool simlar to that you use on phone sockects if you've ever wired one of them. Same with usb and midi, nice large area on the ground for but the signal pins are really rather small. They'd probably work fine, but I don't reckon they'd perform as well as a 6mm jack. For something funky a nice XLR socket and plug at the guitar end would look cool though, and would be perfectly up to the job. I

The output from a guitar pickup has bugger all to do with data rates/speeds and the like. Those figures are all to do with digital data, a guitar outputs an analogue signal. Basically pickups generate a varying voltage, which your amp turns into sound. You need two wires between guitar and amp, one for signal one for ground. To avoid interferance from external electromagnetic fields it's best to use a shielded cable for this. Basically a shielded cable has a metal mesh outer shield around the inner core. This shield is often used for the ground. This outer mesh does it's best to absorb any interferance and try to lessen the amount that gets through to the core carrying the signal. By changing what plugs and sockets you use it's not really making any difference to the basic concept. If you fancy it though you could use XLR leads or stereo TRS jacks to carry a balanced signal down a cable. This would be even more resistant to interferance, although would really only be worth doing if whatever you were plugging your guitar into was capapable of recieving a balanced signal. Which guitar amps ain't but most mixing desks are. A balanced cable requires 3 wires, one for HOT one for COLD and one for GROUND. The HOT signal is your normal signal, the COLD carries the normal signal INVERTED, and the ground is the ground. The sound the signal represents can be pictured as a wave, it you turn this wave upside down, that's the inverted signal. This means that any interferance will be picked up by both the hot and the cold signals, at the other end of the cable the cold signal is then inverted again so it now matches the hot signal. The clever bit is if any interferance was picked up then it will exist in both signals, but as the cold signal has be re-inverted this means that the interferance on the cold signal is the inverse of the interferance on the hot signal, although the actual wanted signal is no longer inverse. So if you simply add the two signals back together the two lots of interferance cancel each other out and leave you with the original signal minus the interferance. You want pics? So you could make a guitar with an XLR socket or stereo jack, which are both capable of carrying the three signals. But like I said, whatever you are plugging into needs to know how to invert the cold back and do the addition. If you just fancy the idea of something funky on your guitar like an XLR plug then you could just wire a cable so that it used only two of the pins and connected to a jack at the other end that you could plug into any amp. Basically quality mic cable don't differ alot from quality intrument cable. Cat 5 I wouldn't be up for using for intrument voltages, the seperate cores are a little thin. Great for digital signals though where intererance isn't such an issue with solutions like error correction and the like. Now if you fancied putting an ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) inside the guitar and then using a cable to carry the digital signal, you could use CAT5, or even optical cable with the right hardware. Of course at the other end again you will need similar systems to plug it into. (Which you don't get on guitar amps!) The real question is, WHY? Quality 6mm jack instrument cable works fine? If you want a better quality then go balanced, if you just want the funky look of an XLR jack then just wire up a cable with signal and ground and ignore the third pin. This is what cheap XLR mics do

Oh, Sorry I make the assumption on these fora that everyones a yank Well I split my time between most the month in Watford and most weekends in Abergavenny.

What have people got against Dylans singing? ( <-- getting old I guess )

I've always had yamaha acoustics meself, and have always been pleased with them. For £300 I'd go hunting for a Yamaha APX5a personally. Should be able to find one either around or under 300 quid. Can be found in a particularly nice sandburst... Searching for a pic I've inadvertantly saved you some time searching for a price! Found at £299. http://www.soundslive.co.uk/moreinfo.asp?ID=1317

not a lot in it is there?

I really can't finish reading that the gibson hyperbole and propoganda got to me.

I gotta admit the two mask approach had occured to me, lining up colour separations was something I didn't think I'd ever be doing again since I left my job as a offset litho printer 10 years ago! The vinyl sounds cool, I've been reading up on it, by solid you mean cut from a solid red coloured vinyl I guess, sound's like that would work nicely, especially with a nice topcoat. Do you ship to the UK?

Excellent advice there Mike, thank you. So would the third option of solid cut vinyl decal with the application backing thingy, would I be able to apply a final clear coat over the top of this to get a nice gloss finish on the whole thing? Yes it is a bit of a complex design But then graphic design is my day job Oh and Skibum yes it is a "Kill Bill" tribute. It looks great even without the "blood" but getting the blood right will definitely make it look that much more than great.

Perhaps that's what you should say from now on Nat. Say it enough times and you'll believe it yourself. Embelish a story around it that it's the one thing you felt you couldn't leave behind. Or maybe you were playing it at a gig the IRA blew up

On the topic of decals and hoping DecalShopMike can give me the benefit of his expertise... I'm attempting to create a finish as below on my Saga HT10. I've pretty much decided the only way to get the exact blood splatter effect I already have drawn in Illustrator is to use a decal. Would a decal be suitable for this, I was thinking paint the yellow and black and then apply the red decal on top. Obviously this would have to be of the clear backed decal type as one could never cut around all the little bitty bits of blood. The only questions that remain are. 1) How difficult will such a large decal be to apply with no bubbles or wrinkles? 2) Will the red colour, laser printed onto a clear decal, be dark enough to overlay the black stripe or will the black stripe show through the decal?

Drak you nutter!

A possibility, I'll have to investigate decals I can color laser print onto. Though a decal of the waterslide type will be a nightmare to apply that size, have to be very careful. It's probably the best way to get a nice clean edge to the red I guess.

Is it not better to apply the darker colour on top?

Then again I could just cut my stomach open over it with a sharp knife *grins*

Aye I thought so too After I've solved the blood spatter problem though there's the Hatori Hanzo lion mark inlay to solve Any process of trying to actually splat the paint on runs the risk of it being uncontrolably crap I could laser print onto something I'd be able mask it off with I guess. That would require quite careful cutting out with a knife, and I'm not sure how it would lay over the carved top? Anyone know of any masking material that would be suitable? Perhaps I might be able to find someone who can laser cut a stencil from a cad file I provide? I

I've decided my first guitar project will probably be a SAGA HT-10 kit, helping me to learn about setup and finishing really. I've been wondering how to finish it. I've thought about trans finishes to bring out the flame and all that but that didn't really excite me and I wanted something different from the norm. So I've come up with this: Spraying a nice base coat of the yellow and then masking off for the black stripe would be fairly easy I guess, but how would you go about doing the blood spatters? Ideally I guess you'd want to do the black last if guitar finishing it anything like overprinting in the world of printingpresses. Perhaps a stencil and spray? Any other ideas?

I find the biggest problem with most UK luthier suppliers is their lack of a decent online ordering website. Us regular web users get so very lazy and won't pick up the phone sometimes. Luthier Supplies and Touchstone Tonewoods are two website's I'd love to be able to order online from.

Fret calc here http://www.manchesterguitartech.co.uk/fret_calculator.php will go up to silly numbers. That's gotta be the third time I've linked his site on here this week for one reason or another. No associaton honest

Check out http://www.manchesterguitartech.co.uk/kitsforsale.html

He'd have to know it was here It's a bit tucked away.

oops : mod please delete

Soldering effectively and professionally requires patience, it's not a quick job. For a start you should keep good care of your iron. Always clean it with a wet sponge between each joint you solder. If you soldering iron is new, then you should make sure you tin it before using it. To tin it basically you are giving it a thin coating of solder to aid in heat transfer. On to soldering. First you must prepare the surfaces you are going to solder. If they are already coated in any solder then you must remove this old solder first, completely. The simplest way to remove solder is with some de-soldering braid. De-soldering braid is a copper braid that will draw solder up into itself. Simply heat the braid with the iron and apply the braid to the old solder. Keep in mind you should be heating the braid not the solder! Now that all the solder is removed or if there was none to start with, you can clean the surfaces with isopropyl alcohol. Everything is now clean and ready to be tinned. You need to tin the two surfaces you are going to join (unless one is a PCB). Simply apply the iron to the end of the wire or contact point and when it is hot enough use the heat of the wire to apply a thin coating of solder. Don't try to apply solder to the iron and 'paint' it on. Now both parts are tinned you can join them together, this is where you need three hands, you need to hold the iron, the solder and hold the two surfaces together! I use helping hand thing that has crocodile clips on bendy arms and a heavy iron base. With the two surfaces held together apply the iron to them. Feed the solder into the join, not onto the iron directly, if the surfaces are hot enough the solder will begin to melt, a good way to make sure everything is hot enough for a nice joint. Feed in enough to fill the gap and make a nice dome shape. Too much solder is asking for a cold joint that will fail later. A good joint will me shiney and silver whereas a bad one will be dull and gray. Clean off the joint with a bit of the iso-propyl first as the resin in some solders can hide the true quality of the joint. Well that's just a little bit about soldering, I've done a fair bit before having been a sound engineer for many years