unclej

GREGMW..i won't be in my shop until sunday or monday but i'll be glad to snap a pic. as to the best size..i don't know. i made mine to make a ukulele and now that i think of it i can't remember if it was two or three inch pipe.. google diy bending irons or something like that and i'll be you find a lot of info on how to make one.

i've got an old alamo 100w tube bass amp head. for a while now it's been acting up so i decided to check it out before i packed all my amp stuff for the move. i plugged it in..plugged in a guitar and them plugged in a jumper that i have with a 1/4" jack on one end and two alligator clips on the other..for the speaker. being old, senile and preoccupied at the moment i plugged the speaker cable into the input jack where the cord for the guitar should go and had plugged the guitar into the speaker output jack. you can't hear anything at all when you do that by the way. when i noticed what i had done i just reached down to unplug the speaker cable whic isn't insulated at the tip and shocked the crap out of myself. why would there be an output of juice at an input jack?

yes indeed..that's exactly how i heat mine. i have a length of 2" galvanized pipe mounted in a floor flange and then mounted to a 2" thick piece of maple with a 2-2 1/2" hole in the back of it leading to the inside of the pipe. behind that i mounted a paint stripping gun into a clamp and pointing into the hole. works great but be careful..if you get it too close to the hole the heat backs up and sorta kinda melts some of the plastic in the barrell of the heat gun. but once you find the right combination it gets the pipe plenty hot for bending. by the way, i drilled a series of 1/4" holes into the bottom of the pipe to allow some of the air to pass through. good luck.

ok gentlemen..the scope and the strat body are spoken for. keep checking back 'cause i just started sorting stuff out forthe move yesterday and i'm sure there will be more. thanks unclej

no blame on anyone..the black ones were the negative..they work and the amp quit blowing fuses. and they all lived happily everafter. thanks all.

check out the classified area if you're interested in some test equipment

check out the classified area for a strat-like body i'm selling

ok..this was the first day of cleaning up and packing up my shop for a move to a smaller space in a much better location. i'm doing away with the tube amp repair part of my operation..not enough profit for the space that it takes up. so i'm offering some test equipment for sale. one heathkit osillascope. old but extremely clean and in perfect working order. manuals and probes included. $35.00 plus shipping. one heathkit vacuum tube voltage meter. works great and includes probes. $25.00 plus shipping one heathkit transistor. works great and includes probes $25.00 plus shipping $75 for all three and i'll figure out the shipping either individually or for all of them after someone shows some interest. i also have one strat like body with an incomplete fabric finish..needs some more sanding and clearcoating. all the edges are smooth and the burst is applied so it just needs to be finished. $25 plus shipping. pm me if you're interested in any of these. click the link below for some pics. thanks sale items

thanks southpa..i figured it was something like that and like i said, i wasnt' too worried about it just curious. thanks for the links.

I would also deduce that the black dot indicates the negative pole. thanks...i say we blame it on lovekraft if it blows up.

i just received two 50/50@500v can caps from ce distributors to replace a couple in an amp i've been working on. they're lcr caps but..the ones i'm removing have a red drop of paint on one pole, a yellow one on another and none on the third. on the side of the old cans it states that the plain one is negative. on the two that i just received only one of the poles is marked and it's marked with a black dot. logic tells me that that's negative but i wanted to check and see if anyone knows for sure before i install them and blow this thing up. i called ce distributors and nobody knew for sure. thanks

i just took in a mexican strat on consignment...serial number MZ3095997... the official fender site states that a mexican strat with MZ3 plus five digits was built in 2003 or 2004. unless i've gone completely blind there are 6 digits behind the MZ3 and i can't find any exceptions on their site. i know it's fairly new and i know that it's a genuine strat and i'm not terribly worried about it but i am curious. anyone got an explanation? thanks unclej

i've done several material finishes and you don't have to strip it at all. take some 180 grit paper and just sand until smooth. if there are any chips in the finish now feather them out so that they won't show. the sanding gives the glue something to adhere to and that's all you need. good luck.

i take it that you're going for an angled headstock and my first thought is that it's going to need some dowells or something similar. typically glued on head stocks are attachec with a scarf joing that's a much greater angle than that. that angle doesn't give you a great deal of glueing surface and is right where the greatest stress from string tension is going to be the greatest. someone should come along in a minute and add to this or tell me i'm crazy. good luck with it.

i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say no..i don't know of any way to bring an aged finish like that back to the original color. on the other hand there are people out there spending tons of money to get their new guitars to look old like that so tell your friend he just saved some major bucks on a relicing job.

i've got a friend/customer that has been a professional touring musician for years. last year he bought his first jay turser..a les paul copy i believe..and absolutely loved it. over the years he's had a couple of "good" guitars either stolen in europe or damaged on a flight. his logic was that the turser sounded good and wouldn't bankrupt him if it was lost or stolen. last week he came in with a new one..a large hollow bodied arch top with double humbuckers. i have to say that it was a good looking guitar. surprisingly well built and after i set it up played like a dream and sounded very nice. i'd say that for seventy five bucks you can't go wrong.

that's the method i always pick...get it..pick? man, i just crack myself up sometimes. seriously..that's exactly how i'd fix it and it works great.

if you've got a soldering iron the cheapest and easiest way to change the tone of a guitar is to change the value of the capacitor on the tone pot/pots. caps are cheap so go to your local electronics store and get several to experiment with. if you do a search you'll find lots of info here on how the different vallues effect your tone. start here: cap thread good luck

check out www.allparts.com

a safe way to do it is to leave about 3/8" to begin with and then fit your pot into the cavity. if there's not enough of the shaft protruding to use the washer and nut then re-set your router to take off just a bit more until you find the optimum thickness for your particular pots. i've never actually measured but i'm guessing that most of the rear routes that i've done have left 1/4" of wood or slightly less. good luck with your project.

i'll check that out monday..thanks

two or three weeks ago i posted the following thread. yesterday i got the amp back and it's doing the same thing. "the symptom: after this little peavey, a bravo 112, warms up it begins to make a sound like feedback only it isn't. it's a low pitch sound..approximtely a low g on a guitar. it does it with all the volume knobs tuned down. it's volume can be controlled only with the reverb control knob and once it starts it increases in volume by itself until it's too loud to stand. it does not seem to start on it's own but after a few minutes of warming up it will start once i pluck a string on the guitar. i know it's not feedback because once it starts it continues even after i unplug the guitar. troubleshooting so far: i've checked the electrolytics and replaced all of the tubes one at a time with known good ones to no avail. i've tested and cleaned all of the control pots and they seem to be functioning properley. before i started checking resistors and such i thought i'd see if one of you might have experienced the same thing and whether or not you think it could be a symptom of a bad reverb can." when it was in the first time i replaced all the tubes, checked all of the electrolitics, checked the wires from the can (though i may replace them today just to be sure) and burnt some sage over it just to be safe. the owner of the amp told me that this was the second can that he had put into it. the one that came with it was bad, the one he had installed broke a spring and now this one. he said it was out of a fender amp of some sort but that the guy who sold it to him said it had the same specs. so my question again is could this problem be caused by the reverb unit going bad? one of the transformers perhaps? i don't have any spares here to trade out and i'd hate to have him pay for another one if that's not it but i've run out of ideas. thanks again johnny

dear mr. larrivee, there must not be too many larrivee guitars in my little town because i just got my second one in five years in for a setup. beautiful guitar.. wonderful mellow sound..great job sir..but your truss rod adjustment system could use a little improvement. you should know that if you have to design a special tool to make the adjustment well, an old redneck tech like me could very well put his eye out with it. not to mention the fact that i will probably go home and kick my cat tonight. not to mention that i may start drinking again..not to mention that having to use a mirror to find the hole and the right angle to make your specially designed tool work properly could cause an aneurism,,. not to mention that there has probably never been any tension on this truss rod since it was new because i had to use the mirror to find the hole and the right angle 27 times thus increasing the risk of said aneurism..not to mention that one of my best customers will probably never come in again because when he did this morning i had both hands and a mirror and your specially designed tool and to tell the truth if i had been born with a prehensel tail i would have had that sucker in the guitar all at the same time and , "what the hell do you want?" is not a proper greeting for a good customer. thank you for your time and keep up the good work. unclejohnny

thanks..you confirmed what i suspected and yes, i did have one blow on me. 'course in this case it was my fault. i was in a hurry and wired one in backwards. shot flaming schrapnel all over my work bench and burnt holes in one of my favorite hawaiian shirts. not to mention scaring the hell out of me. and after that i do indeed wear safety glasses. thanks again johnny

i had a customer bring me a 2-3 year old marshall jcm 900 combo that kept blowing fuses on him. while he was at the store i replaced it and had him play for a while and sure enough after fifteen minutes or so the amp started "crackeling" like there was a bad input jack or output jack on the guitar and the fuse blew. that afternoon i replaced the fuse with a new one, removed the gutar cord and just let it idle. after 15-20 minutes it made the same noise and blew again. so i pulled the chasis, tested the tubes, replaced one 12ax7 that tested extremely weak, re- tensioned all of the input and output jacks, re-tensioned the tube sockets, cleaned all the pots and replaced the fuse. i turned it on with all of the gain and volume controls in the off position and after 15 minutes or so it started making the same noise but didn't blow the fuse. so i started tapping components with my trustry chop stick and when i started taping on the pin end of the two can capacitors the noise reduced and then quit. i turned the amp off, let it cool down and then turned it on again. the noise began again after warming up but there was much less of it. i tapped on one of them fairly smartly and the noise quit altogether. i repeated the turn off/warm up cycle several times leaving the amp on for over an hour the last time and the noise is gone, all controls work properly and the amp sounds great and it didn't blow the fuse. i'm going to re-flow the solder on all the pins on top of the cans in the morning just to make sure that it wasn't a cold solder but my question is: what is there in a can cap that could be loose and would whatever that is cause a blown fuse?