guitarmonky55

after i read this thread last night i went to my worktable and found an old cannibalized board with a bunch of really big 10 and 25v electrolytics, so i started ripping them off and hooking them up at 15vdc, except backwards. FUN! i wish i had a power supply that i could use to throw something massive at them, as im sure it would be more entertaining. but its fun nonetheless.

ok im putting a guitar together with a non-locking trem, and was lookin to a roller nut for tuning stability. ive seen some of them that require you to remove a chunk of the fretboard and i dont think that im up for that right now. im working with a body that was totally stripped and trashed that i picked up for 50 bucks a few months back, and its cut for a gibson style nut. would the roller nut sold on universal jems(http://universaljems.com/cart/nutsroller.htm) fit without too much work? i cant quite tell from the picture and im not clear on the specs of that nut.

epi-les paul with transparent blue finish over a quilt maple top...used and beat to hell. take to it with a meat-tenderizing hammer and light on fire in selected places...instant relic!

theres no plastic tubing-i have an s1620fb and i chipped the paint right by the jack, its just black paint.

mg series are notoriously bad amps, i personally think some of the worst on the market. marshall makes great amps, just not those ones. i would march in there and demand your money back, i mean its been how many days since you bought the amp? a good business should give you a refund for AT LEAST 30 days, if not more. i would stay away from that fender too, it seems a bit shoddy to me.

i once ended up de-constructing an entire fuzz face circuit board and piecing it back together, using steel wool to clean each lead and the pcb before soldering and triple checking everything, only to find that my lead had come unplugged from my guitar amp so even though it was on, no signal

the l-500's have pretty good cleans, especially for high output buckers i noticed that no-one else pointed this out so ill say it:you know that dime's famous 'dean from hell' guitar had a lawrence xl-500 in it right? no seymour duncans in his guitars.

this thread is just kind of to reassure me that im doing this right, ive only ever installed tune-o-matics before. i just got my stewmac shipment with a wilkinson vintage tremmy and sized it up to my mysteriously routed flying v body...and thank god they fit even though the rout looks funny. anyways im going to drill the holes for it(the old ones were filled and as ive found are spaced different) and have a quick q. the bridge has a tiny bit of play in the hole forward and backward. when i press it all the way against the back of the rout its a tiny hair of an angle crooked compared to the bridge bucker rout, and when i push it forward its parallel to it. firstly, will it make a huge difference if its not perfectly parallel? i should think not as i could just adjust the saddles accordingly. if i do make it parallel, should i make it parallel to the neck and ignore the pickup cavities? also, the bridge touches the back of the cavity inside when pushed to the extreme down position...is this a problem? i dont really seem to think so as its only a tiny bit and when its pushed ALL the way down.

bass + guitar amp = bad. i did that with one of my old combos and ripped the living **** out of my speaker. try plugging into a dif speaker and see if that helps.

ok so i aqcuired a guitar body routed for a vintage whammy, and as i feel like trying one out(ive never had a guitar with one) i decided to leave it routed for that and pop one in. im thjinking about the wilkinson 6-hole vintage from stewmac, and considering a trem setter too. are those things any good? i guess the biggest concern for me is stability, as on my floyd guitars im a definite abuser. so, on a scale of 1-10, 1 being a poorly set up squier, and 10 being a perfectly designed floyd system, where would you say this trem with a trem setter would fall?

why dont you ask this over at arons stompbox forum? id be willing to bet youll get better answers at a dedicated stompbox forum than a guitar building forum. i personally dont like to include too many little switches and tone variations in my pedals when i build, i dont see a need to have 10000 different tones. try socketing the input cap and playing around with different values until you find the tone that you imagine in your head when you think about this pedal. then solder that one in.

sounds like a plan! gotta wait for my stains in the mail from stewmac but ill get pics of it as it progresses. ive done a finish before, this is my first time, so forgive this noobish question: i can add my stain colors to the grain filler that i would use to fill in the grooves with so it matches correct? and even though this is a maple top, when i go about lacquering it, should i still give it a pass with grain filler overtop for a really level surface so it gleams when im all done?

im not looking for anything terribly complicated, my stripes are going to be about 1-1.5 inches thick probably, as im doing a corner of the flag where the stars meet the stripes, and the flag is going to have the appearance of waving. so how would i go about doing this, and how deep? would just a plain x-acto blade work?

ok it was broguht to my attention in another thread that two adjacent colored stains on a thin maple veneer will bleed together. im wanting to do an american flag stain job on my rr v with a flamed maple top. ive been thinking about ways to do it and wanted to see if these sound like they would work... 1)start with one color, say red, and seal off the blue/white(im leaving natural) sections with stewmac sanding sealer. apply the stain and then remove the sealer, seal the red, stain the blue, then seal it all and apply clear coats. or 2)apply a thin coat of either lacquer or sealer, and stain on top of that. im using stew mac concentrate dies, so if i did this would alcohol or water for the base be better? do those sound reasonable? i plan on testing the method on scraps of my veneer before attacking the guitar definitely. any help is greatly appreciated

i use solder from sears i have one of those cold heat soldering irons, awesome tool, but i wouldnt suggest it to someone who isnt familiar with soldering already. the tip has 2 little prongs that must get electrically connected for it to turn on, and the tip is very brittle and if you have shaky/heavy hands then you will ruin the tips fast. for the longest time i used a 10 dollar iron from sears that suited me fine, although it ate tips like a mother. i only decided to get a cold heat iron when i started building pedals, as its much more convenient and i have alot more use for it now. i think you should try throwing your compenents into the guitar to solder them, i always find it difficult to hold a part in place, hold the iron on it, keep the component/wire to be soldered in in place, and apply the solder at the same time. if its mounted in the guitar you can stick your wire in, let it sit, and then have the iron in one hand and solder in the other without anything moving around that youre working on. i do the same when i make pedals, i put allmy jacks/switches/pots in and then wire them up then i wire them to the circuit board. whats the strawberry ice? is that like the black ice od that stewmac sells? just this morning i installed a makeshift black ice od in my sg by placing 2 schottky diodes from the volume pot to ground. i wired them up to a little on/on switch so i can switch between the normal capacitor on the tone control and then bypass that for the diodes. best of all, i got the diodes as free samples from central semiconductors and the switch free from e-switch as a sample. i love the internet

sounds like a good idea. so what would i use to seal the wood? im not very experienced in this area.

that sounds pretty good, but im going to start researching the heck out of it before i give it a try. any help would be appreciated!

i was planning on trying something like that since i want to use waterbase stains. would it be plausible? and what would be the best product to seal the wood with? to make that all the simper, my cut of maple is extremely white and the figure is deep on it, so im not planning on dying the white stripes but leaving them natural, and i guess i could go without deepening the grain since its a relaly thin veneer. any suggestions?

Ok so i just got my 23x10 flamed maple veneer from the wood well(awesome site, great price for big veneers for flying v or similar big guitars) Now im preparing to apply the veneer and have a few q's: 1)the body for my guitar is completely unfinished at the moment. I was planning on applying the veneer and then lacquering the back and sides(which will be a thin opaque blue), then staining my design on the top(american flag ) and then clearcoating the entire thing. does this sound good or would anyone here change the order? 2)im planning on staining the veneer black and sanding back a bit to bring the grain out, should i do this before or after lacquering the back? i was thinking before, as it will simply allow more time for the wood to dry completely before it gets finished. plus less risk of sanding up the sides and making a mess accidentally. man this wood grain is killer looking, and i only paid 12 bucks for it . i cant wait to get thsi guitar together!

ever played one of the original gretsch chet atkins country gentlemen? my grandfather has an original from the first year of production, although its in pretty bad shape. what a guitar though, never seen anything so nice in my life.

also invaluable for modifying other tools for guitar specific jobs. for example this weekend i needed to remove some frets so instead of buying the 26 dollar pliers from stewmac i bought a pair from home depot for 10 bucks and ground the face sharp just like stewmacs with my dremel...works a charm

ok im just weighing my options here, im not sure what im planning on doing yet but im considering the possibility of converting my current project from the vintage that it was routed for at the factory into a floyd. ive never done this before...is it a very hard job, and is there much room for error? also, i dont have a real router, but i do have a dremel with a router base, could i use that?

unless you have your guitar loaded with tons of stuff sucking the juice......is it really a problem? i have guitars with emgs in them and rarely have to replace the batteries(4-5 months), and i play alot too. and i sure have never had the batteries totally fart out on me.

i love you! thank you so much, i couldnt find anything like that for the life of me, and its the right price too. now i can proceed in building my super v!

ok so i want to add a flame maple top to my jackson rhandy rhoads v body, but i need a big chunk of wood to do so. i had wanted to buy the bookmatched flamed maple set from universal jems, but its not big enough. i need it to be at least 22x17 total...anybody have any idea where i can get my hands on something like that? i already tried sifting through the lumber suppliers listed on the main site and i havent been able to come up with anything. [edit] im in the market for something on the cheap side too, i just dont have the funds to pay a huge gob of cash for some wood. the 15 dollar price tag on universal jems was a sweet deal, and thats the kind of thing im in search of.