onelastgoodbye

humbucking sustainer succes!! sort of.. I managed to break both my coils (hardware store 5 min epoxy crap) but they're still somewhat useable. One coil is 1.8 ohms, the other, reverse wound is 3.3 ohms. figured If this thing still works, the next ones can only get better. So I hooked it up to a 10 watt practice amp (I know, I know, but it's all I have since the little gem is fried) and it seems to work. Efficiency is pretty bad, can't get any high notes, thing gets hot (gee wonder why ) but...drum roll... NO EMI. It only starts squealing if I hold it right above the emg (closer than 6-7mm). It's so quiet you start wondering if it's actually on. proof-of-concept I guess. I hear some distortion on the clean signal , but I'm *pretty* sure this is from the practice amp, so the background distortion problem might be solved. What I really need at the moment is a better circuit so I can draw better conclusions. In particular, I'm having problems splitting the pickup signal. Some sort of active splitter/buffer would be nice...right now my guitar out goes to the practice amp, which has the headphone out signal going to the big amp, and the speaker signal to the driver. I'm holding the speaker leads in one hand, the driver in the other....Not exactly practical or safe. Another thought..the ceramic magnet I'm using (standard cheap pickup magnet) is way to powerful. It could easily be 3-4 times smaller. There's so much string pull it might actually be working aginst the driver.

Bit of a problem here.. The pva didn't work out, so today I got me some 5 min epoxy and wound a new coil. Now here's the catch... I figured about 7.3 metres of 0.2mm wire would get me to 4 ohms. So I cut 7m off the reel, measured it, turns out it only takes 6metres. Cool. I then proceed to wind the coil, pot it, wait for it to cure, comes out pretty good, but when I measure the resistance of the wound coil, I only get 1.8 ohms?

that's right, you explain it better than me i've got a few coreless bobbins lying around (see page 103). If you've used epoxy, you can gently tap the core out with a hammer without damaging the coil itself. Just be careful you don't break any windings. Don't know if the core material would make an audible difference though. throughout this thread, there have been quite a few working drivers, all quite different too. tall coil, flat coil, wide core, narrow core, rare erth magnets, neodymium, ceramic, internal magnet, magnet shared with pickup,...the only things that always come back are the 8 ohm coil and 0.2mm wire. Same recipe, different cakes; and anyone who wants to know which is best, better do a lot of baking! right now I'd (personally) like to focus on, in the following order (1) getting rid of any EMI (2) getting the thing as small as possible (3) implementation/setup (4) battery drain because I believe those are the biggest obstacles if you'd actually want to market and sell the thing. Not that we're actually going to do that, just an old dream of mine and, i'm sure, Pete as well. We're getting pretty close to solving some of these issues (thanks, col ) and the dual driver might just be a breakthrough. Let's not forget this thing already has some features that improve a lot on the current commercial systems (no routing, no loss of the neck pickup, simpler and smaller circuit,..). Give it another...50 pages or so

Some thoughts on the bobbinless driver...don't bother with the plastic stuck to the metal; just use the metal by itself. Regular epoxy won't stick to it, unless you use jbweld or something. I didn't use clamps, the magnetic force of the err..magnet held the (temporary) metal bobbins in place. You have to be careful while winding, as the whole assembly can shift and slide if you pull the wire too hard. My jiggamathingie makes things a lot easier because the bobbins clamp to the core. The core extens 2mm from the coil at the top, and about 5mm from the bottom, which equals the height of the ceramic magnet that's supposed to sit up against it. In fact, my humbucking driver should look pretty much like the diagram 3 post's up (interaction between pickups), only without the bobbins. I wound my first coil on the jiggamathingie yesterday, there's some good news and some bad. The good (1): the jig worked like a charm. The bad (1): I used PVA because my scales mess up when I try to mix small batches of epoxy (the digital scale isn't all that accurate so I can't get ratio's close enough, resulting in a faulty mixture which refuses to harden). Only to find out the PVA takes verrrry long to harden (the air can't really get to it). The bad (2): a 4 ohms coil is a lot smaller than I expected, so I'll have to adapt the jig. The good (2): a 4 ohms coil is a lot smaller than I expected, so the driver can be a lot smaller! Ultimately, If one could find a suitable internal magnet, it could be as small as 56 mm long x 10 mm wide x 2 mm thick (yeah, 2mm!). I'm thinking flexible magnetic sheets ? (actually even sourced some in 2 mm thickness)...

http://www.till.com/articles/PickupResponseDemo/index.html http://www.geocities.jp/dgb_studio/index_e.htm go to > pickups > pickup position(guitar) Those two links should at least give you an idea. Some say there's a sweet spot, most say it's personal preference... Tim

its 10 ohms...brown black black (which is 10 ohms right? ..damn resistor color charts). As I recall (it's been a while since I've played around with it),pins 1 and 8 open didn't have enough gain to drive the driver, pins 1 and 8 closed was way too much. Note that I am using the little gem, not the ruby. Are you sure about the max gain thing? I thought it would be around gain x 100. There was no audible ss clipping when I hooked it up to a speaker, though again, it's been a while. I'd go and verify but apparently i've cooked the circuit (seems like my adapter puts out 17v instead of the advertised 12v ) on another note, some interesting tidbits I read on the sustainiac site: On 2-humbucker installations, we don't recommend using a SINGLE-COIL pickup mounted immediately next to the driver. The driver magnetic field will affect the pickup output in such a way that three of the strings will have lower output than the other three. Therefore, on these installations we recommend that you use a mini-humbucker next to the driver, not a single-coil pickup. Soo, if I get it right, one coil of the bilateral driver is 'cancelled out', while the other is 'summed' by the pickup coil. Another vote for a full dual rail humbucking driver? Also: The Sustainiac Stealth or Stealth Plus works very well with active pickups such as EMG. We do recommend that you use a separate battery with the Sustainiac. This is because the sustainers use more battery power than active pickup preamps do. So, you could end up with a dead battery on a gig if the battery dies and you are left with no pickup function. Also, if you run both off the same battery, grunge will most certainly be introduced into the active pickup signal (or even oscillation in some cases). We supply a special 9-pin guitar jack for guitars having active pickups. This allows independent battery hookup and grounding to prevent these problems. EMG active pickups have reverse electrical polarity than most passive pickups. Therefore, you have to reverse the driver wire colors (black and red) from that shown in our installation mmmm... grunge... oscillation... independent grounding...

I have a 10 ohms resistor between pins 1 and 8, and my gain control pot is less than halfway up, so the 386 is not clipping. Any more volume and the squeal gets uncontrollable. There has been some debate wether it was best to excite the strings with a clean signal or a full-out clipped-compressed signal. I'm still not sure. You'd think a string would be driven the easiest by mimicking it's natural behavior, thus a clean signal. I do think the lm386 puts out way more power than is actually needed, provided you have a sensitive enough bridge pickup to go along with it. I remember getting tremendous squeal even from 40 cm away from the pickup on my older (badly potted) drivers. mmm something comes to mind here...could the magnetic pull of the existing pickups have anything to do with driver efficiency? PSW is using three single coils, they probably inhibit string movement more than my one EMG in the bridge. Maybe that's why he benefits more of the 'raw power' attack. Spazzyone has proven, that with enough power, you can make a regular pickup into a driver. Even sustainiac and fernandez seem to do it jackhammer style ( I really like your 'only there when needed' approach as an alternative). I'm hoping to build a humbucking driver in the next few days, might just take care of that EMI. Tim

Yes. Really annoying and not even that subtle in my case. I always attributed it to the fact I didn't use a preamp (just the emg directly to the little gem) but I see you get it too. I do hope it's not the driver feeding back to the pickup via the strings, cause that would be pretty hard to inhibit.

As a page 30 vet, it's great to see how far this thing has come. 107 pages without any real flame war, has to be a record . People (including me)seem to be having trouble with coil potting, so here's some further explanation on what I think might solve the problem: the Jiggamathingy® It basically consists of the driver coil core, two temporary removable bobbins (the top bobbin is removed, lying to the right) and two biger L-profiles that form the sides of the coils. The bobbins are made up of two smaller L-profiles, bolted together with a layer of plastic in between. the plastic has the same width as the driver core and a cutout for it, so it sort of clamps onto the core. The idea is to clamp the bobbins to the core, then wind the coil while applying your potting fluid of choice, then the whole assembly gets pushed into a wooden block (the yellowish bit in the picture), and finally the two big profiles get screwed to the wooden block, sliding in between the bobbins an compressing the windings. It's made in aluminium so epoxy won't stick to it, and it has a certain degree of modularity to it, e.g. varying core size. Probably overkill for a one-off, but it's not that hard to build (i'd certainly suspect anybody with guitar building experience to pull it off). The block is the crucial part, because it has to make everything fit snuggly together. In it's current state it's ment for one coil of a humbucking driver, as small as I think I can physically make it; the coil itself is 6 x 56 x 3 mm, the whole 'bucker driver is gonna be 12x 56 x 8. Now if I could find smaller magnets... Tim

Hey thanks Pete, I really like the idea of a hybrid fretless.. a see through vinyl could take care of the scratching. That's the cool thing about these forums, having input from others really triggers the inspiration. It's like a massive group brainstorm! It's epoxy resin and only one layer of carbon (so no, that doesn't provide any real strength an is just cosmetic) to saturate the carbon cloth you just brush the epoxy onto the wood then lay the cloth on top of it, finally you keep on brushing the cloth, effectively 'pushing' the cloth into the resin and removing any excess air. The trick her is to keep everything fairly dry and not use to much resin. It's no different than working with glassfibre mat, really. Tim

I really like the 'contemporary' look it has now. the contrast of the white maple and black emg's /wenge, also the absence of pickup rings. If it were mine I'd leave it like that, I'm less fond of the style of the proposed final result (though that looks very 'together' in it's own right). You sort of have this cool new interpretation of a classic 50's-60's look going with your milk dud design, and I feel the current state of the guitars exemplifies it more. All IMO of course. Tim

updates.. It's my 2 new best friends, Component a and Component b. Together with mr Carbon Mask. oh I think I know this guy Now how did we get this far? we chuck some poly on the back spray some on the front looking neat, huh? Let's take a closer look... aah!! pinhole galore! should have used vacuum when I did the carbon fretboard layup Could'nt let those pinholes pass, so after a spot filling-sand-spot filling-clearing session the body is drying as I write this .The fretboard is in a much better state now, I'm hoping another round of sanding and final clear should take care of the problem. My biggest concern, however, is the fact I probably won't get the fretboard completely flat (not unless I want to sand onto the carbon or spray 2 kg's of clear). Then there's the fret slots...I can only do this AFTER clearing and there's no room for the fret saw on the last frets. Overall there's quite a few things I'm not happy with and should have done better, even though it's a first for me ( well, second really, but I'm not yet ready to unveil my first build to the world, besides it was years ago )and not a very orthodox build either. So I'm not sure what to think of this one... I do know the next one 'll be totally kickass . comments an critics welcome, Tim

I have dismantled my previous coils as I needed the magnets, it makes an interesting comparison. the top coil is 0.3 mm wire, potted with pva WHILE winding. Note the loose inner windings the mid coil is 0.3 mm wire, potted with epoxy mainly AFTER winding. Note the loose inner windings the bottom coil is 0.2 mm wire, potted with epoxy WHILE winding. No loose windings and much smaller in size. The pva is still a bit 'soft', while the epoxy is rock hard. I do believe any 'looseness' is detrimental for driver performance, so I would choose not to use pva if possible, though it's ease-of-use and wide availability are in it's favor. For what it's worth, i've been working on a jiggymathingie for winding bobbinless blade drivers. here it is . We'll see how well it works Tim

wow..wowzers. That's it. I'm building me a humbucking driver cause that was pretty damn good.And a pretty convincing argument for the humbucking/bilateral driver theory. I simply cannot believe you got such good response by simply slamming a p.a through a pickup . And NO emi you say ?

Thanks for all the comments, guys that's where i got the idea! Carbon fiber layup is actually pretty easy. I'd say it's even less troublesome than working with glassfiber if you take your time with it. i wouldn't mind having driskill's vacuum setup though.. mmm I can think of an easy way to make a mold for an integrated-fret-fretboard, though the real problem is finding a suitable material for the fretboard. Carbon fiber may be strong, but it's not very resistant to abrasion. Most likely you'd be looking at some sort of ceramic material..not exactly DIY. I'll look into it, might be fun. Heh. Actually...that was a "foutje van de firma". Didn't pay attention to the orientation during lay-up. Well, as they say, mistake=upportunity. Originally I had even planned on laminating the body and fretboard with a one-piece carbon cloth. Unfortunately, part of the cloth had an unkind encounter with the vacum cleaner here's more progress: so this was all just to hide a few chips and dings. Think i overdid it? this is the front and headstock finished and sanded to 1000 grit A view of the compound radius fretboard let there be light bigger pic of the back. The back of the neck was painted with lot's of swirls and paisley-ish stuff at first, but I figured it didn't fit the rest of the graphic, so I started over. It'll probably stay this way, apart from some filling in the neck-body transition. even bigger picture to do list: filling clearing order hardware drill tuner holes fretting (that'll be fun!) mount hardware sustainer almost there, Tim

I'd at least do the outer laminations in a different colour, like wenge or ebony. You'll have a continuation of your design, yet break it up visually, which would make it look more interesting, and minimize the connotation to a cobweb or boat deck. Now what would be really cool is if you would carve out those two outer areas.Nothing radical, just like a faint belly carve. That would really make those center laminations pop. my 2 eurocents, Tim

thanks for the tip, I've been using this technique for gluing the carbon fretboard laminate and it works very well (I used epoxy though). It's hand painted I hope mine will as well! Your merbau looks quite different from mine, mine is pretty red, like a dark mahogany. maybe it's a regional thing, or a change in colour from aging (this slab has been lying in the basement for a 30-something years). Since I can't seem to find a decent job around here, there's lots of free time to work on the guitar (anybody got work for a prototyper/industrial designer? I'm willing to travel ) Progress: the backside of the body is pretty much finished, still need to apply some graphics to hide the tearout on the neck and it'll be ready for clear. funny thing is I'm starting to like the back better than the front... Next up is the mold for laminating the fretboard carbon.There's two wooden rails that match the fretboard radiuses on both ends of the fretboard; and then I used a straight aluminium profile to err..."brush" plaster in between, using the rails as guides.This then results in a perfect negative form of a compound radius fretboard. The plastic on top is self-adhesive vinyl to prevent the epoxy ( which you laminate the carbon with) from sticking to the mold. Normally you'd use wax for that, but this is a lot faster, and a sure-fire way to achieve a good surface finishing. proper waxing is one of the hardest parts in moldmaking and I've had some bad experiences with parts sticking to and subsequently destroying the molds. This is the result. I wasn't completely satisfied with it as there's a lot of "pitting" from tiny air pockets being trapped in between the carbon cloth and the mold. Nothing that can't be solved with a little poly lacquer, but I'm definitely gonna start vacuum bagging in the future to avoid it. I couldn't source fiberoptics locally, so had to settle for leds. As expected, not a fun soldering job, and the routing is even worse. dremel + crappy bit + radiused neck + already glued body wings + ptp soldered led's = lots of cursing and swearing Luckily it works very well (hope it stays that way). the leds on frets 3 - 12 are visible from front and side; leds 15 - 24 only on front. Finally, the leds were then epoxied in (the epoxy managed to seep into the truss adjusting slot...grrr) and the carbon laminate glued on. I just taped the neck, body and front of the laminate off with vinyl tape, put epoxy in between, then wrapped everything (tightly) with regular paper tape( guess it's sort of like an advanced saran wrap technique ). Worked really well, as you can see here, much to my own surprise. Things are starting to shape up, Tim

progress...

there's a neck angle, clearance for the strings is around 5mm where you're picking, wich isn't a lot, but it's enough. the fret slots in the cutaway area will indeed be finnicky but I think it can be done. I wonder if it's possible to rout the slots with a dremel, provided I find a right size bit (I know driskill routs them on his cnc). The frets will be perpendicular to the bottom edge of the fretboard (another idea), so it would be pretty easy to buid a jig that uses the edge as a guide. One thing that isn't finished yet is the carbon laminate I'll put on the fretboard. I'll make a negative mould for that, so I can get the compound radius just right and have a perfect finish. You're right about the Merbau being prone to splintering. It has funny grain sometimes too, which can cause unpleasant surprises when chiseling.It's hard to tell wether the grain is going 'up' or 'down', so when you're chiseling in the wrong direction, you dig into the wood and pull chunks out. bit of a pain when doing the cutaway. I've had bad experiences with painting merbau. It just won't stick.when I painted with oil-based paint you could pull it right off again! waterbased seems better as it soaks into the wood, if only a little. The merbau refuses to glue with pva, too; and even epoxy doesn't stick all that good (as you alluded, but it'll hold well enough though). The chips and dings will be filled with epoxy+wood dust. If that still doesn't (cosmetically) do, I'll camouflage it with the graphic. the epoxy is really great for a flat surface. If you make sure the guitar is level, it flows out really really well; much better than I anticipated. Any radius or bevel complicates matters though.It's hard to assess the remaining thickness of the epoxy as there's a sort of optical illusion at play (especially with carbon fiber, which tends to look "3d-ish"). I bet you could get by with a small radiused sanding block though, and a lot of stamina. and as for the sustainer...I'll get round to it..eventually

Just curious, isn't there a potential for neck warpage or bowing when you put the whole thing in the curing oven? Great guitar, and your dedication is admirable. Tim

the fretboard is level with the body because I figured there's no real reason why a fretboard should stick out...there's less clearance for picking, but if anything it will force me into a lighter picking style, which is a good thing imo.A traditional fretboard is a bit easier to build though, so it's not something I'll repeat on future guitars. the fretboard has a compound radius from 10"-ish at the nut to completely flat at the 24th fret. meanwhile..phase 1 of the "strategically placed big custom dragon graphic in black/white/red to hide wood tearout". Not exactly a dragon anymore. I can't take credit for the design, it's heavily based on(well...shamelessly copied) something I saw on pamelina h.'s site. She does great work! Tim

Hi guys so here's what I've been working on for the last couple of months (another strat derivative,really ) all merbau neckthrough no separate fretboard carbon fiber laminated on the front (still in doubt whether i'll do the back or not) lots and lots of mistakes... the black stuff is just paint to prevent the wood from peeking through the carbon (currently sanding it back off) the white stuff is polyester car body filler (I'll probably sand it out and use epoxy instead) the carbon still needs a few heavy coats of epoxy then loads of sanding (it'll look A LOT better when finished) the fretboard will also be laminated, I'm doing that on a separate mold, though. I'll get some more info up once I've gotten a bit more sleep; in the meantime here's some pics for ya. front back volute plug_thingie headstock back_again

The coil works and does a pretty good job on the high strings, but it has to be positioned in an EXACT spot somewhere between the 24- 25th fret, otherwise it squeals/feeds back like mad. The squealing is a lot less than with my former badly potted drivers though (including a PVA one). In my opinion, a marketable version of this driver would require some form of shielding or shunting, maybe a humbucking configuration, because it puts out massive amounts of EMI. Fact is I experimented with steel pieces (just holding them to the sides of the driver) and that seemed to quiet the beast significantly...also, I recall someone here made a succesful driver with an iron bar sitting next to it in order to emm...inhibit the magnetic field. The sustainiac driver has some small shunts as well, atleast in the patent drawings. I hear 2-part urethane needs to be mixed juuust right to properly harden, but I don't know if that's the stuff you're using. Epoxy is a bit more forgiving, tho' I've mixed some bad batches before; those household scales really aren't that precise. Maybe you could look into 2-part polyester.There's lots of different types (from car body filler stuff to guitar laquer) and some of them can be used like you would use epoxy. It usually dries a lot quicker though. Tim

Hi peeps, I'm still reading up on this thread almost daily, but it's pretty hectic for me right now so I don't have a lot of posting time. There has been some interest in the bobbinless driver it seems, so here's a little quick something that might help you guys...the new and improved way of making temporary bobbins: the steel (or mdf or cardboard or whatever) pieces are there for support, the PE is there because it's about the only thing that epoxy doesn't stick to. If you're wondering where to find PE, things like shampoo bottles and those 5 litre containers for thinner and acetone are usually made out of PE plastic. As for potting with epoxy while winding...it can get pretty messy so you'll have to be careful.Wear gloves if possible because it's actually pretty unhealthy stuff and hard to get off your hands (apparently it can make the tips of your fingers go numb after years of (a)buse). Here's a tip... I usually let the mixed epoxy sit for a few hours before using it. That way, it's less runny and more sticky which makes it a lot easier to work with (obviously it depends on the sort of epoxy you're using: short-long drying time). rock on, Tim