octavedoctor

I'll look forward to it...

Shame you're not in Bristol you could've popped in to see me at Sound Control, I could've shown you a few tips. Still, feel free if you're ever down this way. Just be sure to mention the forum or you might get the bum's rush i reserve for timewasters! Eltham

Hold on a sec....10 mm sounds like Grover size....check out the Grover mini locking tuners, they work great and should fit this guitar out of the box, not mods required. As for the string savers, I have them on a couple of guitars, I think they're really good (i.e., I don't break strings anymore). Haven't had that issue on my teles...and the string savers do affect tone somewhat (increased midrange, they say...) I also put on Graph Tech's string trees, they're cheap and they make sense to have. Your right that's Grover size but they won't fit without mods because the hole in the headstock is 8mm and needs to be enlarged at the back to 10mm.

I find that enlarging a hole using a centre point drill straight into the hole can cause splintering. It's not a bad idea to countersink first. The 10mm reamer's a good suggstion,but when I used one I found the fit of the tuner to be a little tight. The tapered reamer allows me to control the fit of the tuner.

Stew Mac do a tapered reamer but it may be too shallow a taper and cost a packet. I use a basic tapered reamer which I got from Tandy (Radio Shack in the US). It's not a great precison tool but its taper is sharp enough that it doesn't open out the hole in the front of the headstock (which doesn't really need enlarging). It's actually sold as a tool for opening out holes in sheet metal. Ideally I suppose you'd have a stepped hole; 8mm at the front, 10.5 x 10mm at the back, but sometmes life's just too short. There's a company called Chronos in the UK that sell a wide variety of engineering tools including tapered and adjustable reamers. Go to the online catalogue and look for repairmans tapered reamer, 1/8 - 1/2" http://www.chronos.ltd.uk/acatalog/

Which Uni are you at Tom?

Whoops sorry, I just tend to assume in these forums.... You don't need to remove the 3/8" just 3/16"; say 5mm. You only need to remove the amount needed to bring the 12th fret towards the bridge, that should bring the saddles within range; there's no reason why the saddles should be right at the end of their screws if you do this. All you are doing is contracting the scale from the fixed point of the bridge. If the scale is 3/8" shorter then the nut moves by that much, the 12th fret by half that (3/16), the 19th fret by 1/8 and so on... There should be no need to adjust the saddles at all, if they were correctly positioned before. If you want to improve their range, try nudging the bridge plate a couple of mm forward, or fit extended screws Try this: measure the distance from the club end of the neck to the 12th fret, then subtract this from the 12.375" that represents the distance from the saddles at their furthest reach forward. Measure the resulting distance forward from the sounding point of the saddles wound to the end of their range and mark the position of the end of the neck on the body. As the saddles only have to come back to compensate intonation this should give you an idea of the optimum position of the neck pocket. No guesswork.

An interesting link. Very clever. Me, I use a spreadsheet. Bang in your scale length and it produces a series of data which links to a Vector graphics program, prints out a template. I used it to fret a friend's guitar project recently. I like the fact the yours is web based. Full marks.

Fascinate

What exactly do you mean by don't meet at the 12th? Surely you would mark out the scale on each side of the fingerboard and then join the dots. The way I would do it would be to work outwards from the 12th so you have an angle on the nut and on the bridge while the 12th is straight. Your fret positions measured from the bridge should be this: sorry I haven't worked out how to tabulate in post format 24 (nut) 22.65 21.38 20.18 19.05 17.98 16.97 16.02 15.12 14.27 13.47 12.71 12 11.33 10.69 10.09 9.52 8.99 8.49 8.01 7.56 7.14 6.73 6.36 6 23.5(nut) 22.18 20.94 19.76 18.65 17.61 16.62 15.68 14.80 13.97 13.19 12.45 11.75 11.09 10.47 9.88 9.33 8.80 8.31 7.84 7.40 6.99 6.59 6.22 5.87

I experimented with reverse fan fretting (contracting the scale on the bass side) when I was a budding guitar maker. Keep the bridge straight, I thought I'd build the compensation into the scale instead. I thought it would solve the problem of the lower frets being overcompensated by the displacement needed to compensate at the higher frets. I built the damn thing before I did the maths that told me that contracting the scale was exactly the same in mathematical terms as moving the saddle by a fixed amount... Duh!

No offence, but only amazing if, like Buzz, you've haven't been tuning a guitar properly in the first place. The Feiten System has no sound technical rationale and he's made a tremendous number of errors of technical fact, history and assumption, especially on the subject of string tension and equal temperament; in fact he doesn't even seem to know what equal temperament is! He appears to be confusing it with either Mean tone or Just Intonation. I've seen many of these guitars and the first thing that I find is that the owners don't know how to tune them anyway (which makes it all a bit pointless) and the second thing is that they don't sound any better or worse than a standard strat which i've tuned and intonated myself using a true tempered intonation protocol. One guy I know had all his guitars modified by a major UK repair shop but was then given no guidance as to what was involved in tuning them and in his words "they didn't sound much different to me". When an Ibanez that had been modified arrived on my bench the intonation was noticeably false. The shop where I work also had two Fylde Calibans in stock; we couldn't sell them because they sounded so bad and we couldn't get them in tune. When I investigated I found that they have a zero fret which is set about 2mm forward of theory and this was the cause of the intonation problems. There are better and simpler ways to acheive satisfactory intonation without modifications but it involves educating people to a more technical level than they are currently used to. See my posts here: http://p068.ezboard.com/fthecrossroads1973...opicID=21.topic

It's like with intonation. I've always done a tempered intonation which references every note on the fingerboard to every other note of the same pitch value. When you start doing it it's as complicated as hell and i've tried teaching it to others without much success, they either get it or they don't. I never use a tuner, just a tuning fork and my ears. I've noticed that every type of guitar has slight differences in the pattern of saddle stagger; Les Pauls have a different stagger to Strats for example, because of the effect of the different headstock shapes on the incremental strain... Anyway, in the run up to Christmas I've had to shift a lot of set ups really quickly and I've found myself short-cutting by setting just two strings by ear then setting the others visually... Seems to work! OK. i know i've drifted off topic...

When I made that statement the point I was making is that he had subjected himself to ridicule, which isn't helpful; constructive guidance achieves more than the braying mockery of an open forum. I admire Knoxville for his display of cool under fire; he's taken the flak like a man and I hope he goes on to develop the self critical ability he needs to be a craftsman. Knoxville!

You're quite right Doug, but according to the spec he quotes in his post his arc relief seems to be spot on so i don't think the problem is there. When I was working for Höhner I was having to set up about thirty guitars a day; you couldn't afford to be precious about these dimensions you just had to get them into playable condition pronto. I used to put a capo on the seventh or eighth fret and play the guitar above the 12th fret, lowering the action until the strings were as low as possible without buzzing. Then I'd move the capo to the first fret and tighten the truss rod until it just started to buzz when played normally in the lower register. Then I'd back it off a touch. This proved to be an infallible way of setting the guitar up and really consistent. If it didn't feel right after that, then there was something wrong. If I had time I'd lower the nut a bit...