Paul Marossy

I think a lot of problems are solved when you only concentrate on one string. I played a friend's ebow for a little while. It pretty much just vibrates the string without making the guitar create noises other than the note being played. I really like the ebow effect, but it doesn't work at all with my style.

What's the deal with that circular notch in one of those triangular pieces?

I am partial to the Sprague "Atoms" myself. BTW, I have some J&J tubes in one of my amps. I think they're nice tubes.

OK, gotcha.

Why not?! It's not like you are addicted to any music related electronics, right? There is a lot of sharp guys over there. I have learned quite a lot from that forum. Hey, you could start your 24 page sustainer thread there, too! Actually, there was a lengthy thread on sustain, but it wasn't anything where some brave soul was actually trying to build their own guitar mounted sustainer circuit. You could also ask this same amp question at Aron's forum, a little off topic, but there are some guys over there who design amps and stuff. Also, the AX84 forum would be a great springboard for your idea(s).

psw, I like your sense of humor! Yeah, I can relate to trying to use a hammer, jigsaw, drill or Dremel Tool quietly in my workroom while everyone else is sleeping, and everything else you said, too. Never thought of the hand drill, I may have to try that! (My goodness, I must be a hardcore do it yourself-er. Wait a minute, did you see my domain name?! ) EDIT: I wonder how the guys that designed the Fuzz Face and wah pedal got together before the days of the internet to share their plan to change music history?!

No. From what I gather reading at the Sustainiac website, the driver-transducer must be a certain distance from any pickups, or a lot of unwanted side effects will occur. Psw has had those sorts of problems, too. If you go back and read the earlier parts of this thread, he was grappling with weird noises, oscillation etc. which were minimized or exaggerated depending on what he used and where it was located.

Whoa! You are way over the top dude! I didn't quite catch your drift when I read this thread thru the first time, but that would be really cool. Sounds basically like the Roland Guitar Synth in concept, but with a built-in sustainer, too. I really do hope that you figure the thing out, I think it would make waves!

Boy, such sob stories! I have a boy 11 mos old, and a girl that turned three last October. Both are high energy types. We are toast at the end of the day! We call my boy "Mr. Grabby Hands" because he literally wants to grab everything he can put his hands on! Anyhow, for the last couple of months, I have made a concerted effort to get up at 4:00AM to practice (with headphones) and to do projects as much as possible. That gives me about 2 hours in the morning before I have to go to work at 7:00AM. Then there is always the weekends to work on stuff when I can. I try to be considerate as much as I can. It's different from when I was single, harder to have time for "projects". But, when I was single, I didn't have much of an interest in electronics and stuff. Go figure. EDIT: My little girl, Makenna, seems to really like drums a lot. Who knows? Maybe she'll be a girl drummer one day. She likes to plink on my guitar, too, though.

psw- it sounds like you always have several things cooking at once. Reminds me of myself! I am cutting back for now, though, because I am kind of burned out on building stuff and tweaking stuff and experimenting in every spare minute that I have. Well, also because my little boy is 11 months old now and walking, so he needs a lot of supervision because he is worse than his big sister was with getting into stuff at this age. Anyway, I can squeeze in a little experiment like this here and there, though. daveq - Don't worry about it. I find this topic to be very fascinating, and I still would like to build something like this into the guitar project. That would make it so cool! I may break down and buy a Sustainiac to put in there, I'm not sure. I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one just so I could reverse engineer the thing!

Well biohazard, you want it all, don't you?! I would also like a system that would allow you to keep the neck pickup as well. The Sustainiac Model C is a cool gadget, but I can't see myself using it except for in a studio environment, which would be cool, but I would like to be able to use it for live performance, too. It seems like it would be a PITA to use anywhere else but a studio... There's got to be a way to do it. That must have been what psw said when he started on his "sustainer quest". Or would that be "Sustainer Trek"? Oh, never mind...

Gotta love the internet. If you can think of it, someone probably has a webpage on it somewhere with a way to get the info you need. The problem is actually finding it!

I also did notice that stuff oozing out. I wasn't sure if it was indicative of anything, though. I have no experience with the old style caps like that...

That's going to be a tough one to find. I tried the blueguitar.org and Angela Electronics, but they didn't have anything. You may have to make your own schematic in this case. Should be a good challenge...

Awh, don't worry about it psw. This is a very fascinating subject to me. I think I am going to fiddle around with some ideas I have for experimentation's sake.

Yes, it's simple in concept, but apparently difficult to make work in the real world. So then, the strings are actually comparable to a speaker cone, huh? That's very interesting. Of course, there is more than one way to accomplish the "same effect", as the Sustainiac Model C demonstrates.

Well, gee, I didn't know there was a picture of the top of that thing. It looks to me like two sections are wired together for ~80uF and the other one is a standalone at ~20uF. The other four lugs appear to be connected to the case, which is probably connected to ground. You could confirm that easily with a continuity checker. Those types of caps usually had labels on them that would show you how to connect them up various ways - that's what the circle, square and triangle indicate.

Yeah, I agree with you on the sustainer thing. Do you know how the Fernandes or Sutainiac pickups actually work? Maybe this was explained in your monster thread and I missed it, but it seems to me like you could create a circuit that would essentially use something that acts like a magnet and cause it to have a cyclical polarity reversal in order to physically excite the strings. Is this the basic concept or am I way off? Gee, really?!

You may very well be right on that.

NO WAY! It's going to become part of my collection.

7 tabs plus one ground, huh? That's not at all what I expected. OK, I would try placing a post at the Ampage Guitar Amp Forum at http://www.firebottle.com I'm sure that someone there has some experience working on those old Ampegs and can hopefully help you get a replacement if needed, or at least help you on how to test that strange thing. EDIT: OK, I just thought of one thing. The schematic. It should indicate how many caps there are and their values. That might help you to figure it out. Another thing is that those types of caps may not be available anymore, and if so, you will have to improvise by replacing that with modern axial/radial caps. But don't take my word for it, do some more research. I just know those can caps are really hard to find these days...

The cap might be fine believe it or not, but then again, it may have been the cause of the mess in the first place. I believe that the 40, 40, 40 refers to three seperate sections within the cap - three at 40uF each. A lot of those metal can caps were designed to be multi-purpose in terms of capacitance. Depending on how you connect it, you could have a 40uF, 80uF or 120uF cap. I would be willing to bet that it is connected as a 120uF cap, though. According to Doug Hoffman, those pots fail all the time. Definitely sounds like a domino effect. It's hard to say just what started it all, though. It could have been a power tube, the hum balance pot or the cap failed. If it's a bad power tube, then this could all happen again. You really need to determine if those power tubes are good, with no internal shorts or anything...

I heard that was an ebow. In any case, the infinite sustain thing can be very cool for a guitar. It opens up a lot of doors. That's OK, it's sort of related since I was originally going to use Ansil's sustainer circuit, but decided against it because of too many conflicting reports of its performance. Yes, that is a metal flake paint. You can't see it in the pictures, but the whole body has a little bit of sparkle from the overspray. It makes for a nice effect.

Here is a few close-ups of the body as requested. The sunburst looks lighter or darker depending on how the light hits it.

That is cool. I used to work a few doors down from a guy that owned the coffee shop on the corner, Fred Gotz was his name. He used to maintain tube radio equipment when he was in the navy in the 60s, and then he was an instructor at DeAnza College when they had an electronics program and he also worked for lots of other companies doing electronics design and stuff. Anyhow, he was a great resource in helping me with amp problems and designing stuff. My latte breaks used to be 20 minutes long! Just a little question Fred... Too bad they moved away and I got a job at a different engineering firm. Life is always changing, darn it...