Ripthorn

It is sort of like two independent switches (one typical three way and a dpst, they way they have it wired). The one side controls the contacts to each pickup positive and the other side controls the contacts of each pickups ground, so in positions 1-3, it is a normal pickup selector because the ground side is just grounding the typical ground wire. In positions 4-6, it is a normal pickup selector while grounding the second winding on each pickup, thus giving you split coils and pickup selection. You could wire it differently for phase or series/parallel, or whatever else.

Did you replace it with the same kind of switch (e.g., DPDT)? If you replaced a dpdt with an spdt or something like that, you could get that behavior. A little more info is needed.

It appears to just be two separate three way switches in a single body with a single actuator. If you think of it that way, then it should be easier to determine what you can and can't do with it.

If you have already cut the lams,then it will be much more difficult to do. If I were to do it from scratch, here is what I would do: joint one side of paduak and one side of maple from the raw board, and rip your strip (plus a little extra) from one of the two. Glue the strip you just cut to the whole board using the just-jointed faces and let dry. After dry, joint the rough face from ripping the thin strip and then rip the whole board that was glued to to get the strip of that wood. Repeat the sequence of gluing up the ripped lams to a whole board of the next lam over. Then you get nice jointed faces, don't need a thickness planer, don't do anything dangerous, reduce the risk of tearout, etc. The only downside is that it will be very time consuming. If you have a thickness planer, just double stick tape the thin lam to a thicker board that is also longer than your lam, be careful of tearout, make sure you have enough waste on the ends, etc. Drum sander is even better, but I'm guessing you don't have one of those. If we assume you only have a jointer and a band saw and that you already cut the lams and they all have rough faces (hardest case), then the double stick tape thing MIGHT work, but I would use some intense tape, since the risk of the initial blade contact taking your lam and tearing it to shreds is pretty high. And just as a side note, you have to learn how to joint with a jointer, too. There is plenty of technique to it and you also want to make sure the thing is set up properly, as you can ruin your project very quickly with a jointer if it isn't set up right. Anyway, best of luck, hope it works out well for you. Let us know how it goes.

If you are hammering in frets, here are a couple tips that I have found come in handy. When you tap, don't let the hammer bounce, just bring it straight down and don't let it bounce back up. Put some good support behind the neck, I have used a bag full of rice before and it works great. I push the fret in with my fingers to the ends are partly in, then start hammering from the middle out. Before putting in the frets, I use a triangle file through the fret slot to bevel the edge so that the fret seats completely. I find that if a board is properly done, it (usually) doesn't need glue, but that's just me. Usually the slots in pre-slotted boards are deeper than the tang.

Tru-Oil and its sealer will take forever to fill things in. I would go with a little super glue to partially fill the blemishes. I did a tru oil finish over a walnut, alder, and flame maple bass with it and the walnut has a great open-pored look.

If you have a hard time finding one, how about one of those router speed control dials. Then the lathe is on a set speed, but the control will take you from zero to whatever. Combine it with a variable speed lathe and you can get any speed. Of course, a counter would be tough, you may have to use a tach for that.

If the tables are out of alignment as far as angle goes, adjusting the height of the table won't do anything. You need to shim the sides or ends that are low so that you bring the tables into proper alignment. I just gave my 20 year old jointer a very thorough tune up and used a bit of aluminum soda can to shim the ways where the table was low (both sides of the outfeed end, two layers on one side, one on the other since one side was lower). It's quite simple. Loosen the gib screws, put in the shims, adjust height, tighten it up, and off you go (you will likely have to reset the knives once done). This being a combo machine, there might be a little more to it. If you still need more help, I like lumberjocks as a woodworking/tool forum.

There was a thread recently about rattle can 2k clear, but it's like $45/can. I think the thread is in the finishing tutorial section.

Bart, a couple quick observations. First, here's an even simpler experiment to verify the differences woods can make. Take slabs of each kind of wood. Make sure they are the same dimensions. Mount one in a test fixture (a bolt through one corner would suffice). Attach a shaker to one edge of the top of the piece and an accelerometer on the edge of the other side of the top. Excite the shaker with a swept sine wave with low modulation through a wide range. Take the impulse response using the shaker. Do this for each piece, compare output spectra, and whammo, you have your hard scientific proof. Second observation: Of course the wood doesn't effect the magnetic field, but it is actually changing how the string vibrates whether there is a magnetic field or not because it is changing the boundary condition on the ends of the string, so a piece of wood with different response characteristics WILL change how the string vibrates, though the extent to which it changes relative to another piece of wood depends on how radically different the response characteristics are. I think you were simply misunderstanding the physical phenomenon that was responsible for the change. I am not trying to put you down, I'm merely stating that from a scientific standpoint, the cause of the alteration of the string's response is not electromagnetic, but mechanical. I spent years studying and conducting research in acoustical physics and have done experiments with the structural response characteristics of different materials. Now, can YOU hear the differences between pieces of wood? That is the bottom line question here and YOU are the only person who can say what YOU do or don't hear, I'm just speaking from the scientific side of things.

I just found this thread, what a read! Now, I'm a physicist. I've done all the derive a new theory/simulate it/take measurements in a lab/re-evaluate/write a scientific publication thing more than once. I love working in the lab and all, but when it comes to guitars, there are just too many variables to try to ever irrefutably prove much of anything, especially since the end evaluation on performance is subjective. However, do I think generalizations or intuition are useless? No. I did concert hall/recording studio/stadium sound system design for a while and I can tell you that while every venue is different, I know what sound I expect to hear from a certain room. It will be different in the end, but very rarely will it be a dramatic difference that makes me go "OK, so what's going on here that I didn't notice?". In the end, having lots of experience on your own perceptions comes in very handy, especially when you are the end evaluator of a system (a guitar in this case). Anyway, if someone disagrees with your opinion, it's not the end of the world. All of science relies on either proving or disproving someone's idea of how they think things should work in the pursuit of "truth", whatever you wish that to mean. As for mahogany and sapele, I like African mahogany, and I have found pieces lighter than sapele and vice versa. Decide the general idea of what you want, use your experience to go after it. If you don't have enough experience, go get some!

Holy Gorgeous Guitar, batman! Love the look of this thing.

You could move the bridge way back on the body and keep the body the same size. Lots of basses have bridges almost to the end of the body, but if you are going for a true copy, I would guess that it needs to be made bigger by at least a little bit.

As for the 6l6 6p3s question, you can compare characteristics using the data sheets at frank.pocnet.net (my favorite tube resource). You will want to check the heaters (this is a common problem with Russian tubes, where they only accept parallel heaters and a lot of amps will use series) as well as plate resistances. As for the KT88's they are a lot more inefficient, much larger in size, and your power transformer may not be up to the extra load. I would suspect that a production amp would have a PT with only a small amount of leftover power, so putting something that is that much more hungry for power could cause a large draw that could potentially blow out the PT. Of course, you can take it to an amp tech to check out, but unless you are really unhappy with the sound of the amp, I would either go with real NOS 6l6's or just stick with what you've got.

That circuit was my first real try at any kind of circuit. While the soldering job is not great, it works and sounds great.

I thought Scatter's Scattervarius II was an awesome build as far as learning new techniques and really showing what was done and how. And such ingenuity, too.

No list of builders is complete without Perry (rhoads56 is his screen name, I think). He's my favorite as far as following builds. WezV is also very good, and avengers63 is great for getting some unorthodox ideas (though I am using the ebonized walnut neck gig on a couple of current builds).

The input impedance of a cheap amp like that is optimized for magnetic pickups as opposed to piezos. If you are wanting to go cheap, look at the cafe walter pzp-1. I made one for 3 or 4 bucks and it works great in my bass. In theory, you could use one of those cheap amps' preamp, but I wouldn't, I would just make my own.

I don't have stewmac's but I do have one with the modern saddles that looks similar. If I get out in the shop tonight, I will see if my measurements match the ones above for some key dimensions. If they are close, I will take the measurements and post.

A typical rocker switch is little more than making a bridge between the two legs. You could do the jumper and probably be just fine. But don't hold me personally responsible. But virtually all the time a power switch is an spst for the positive voltage to the circuit.

I decided last night that I shouldn't skimp on this part of the build. You're right, Muzz, in that there is too much time and effort put into these to not put in the right item.

Bummer, guess I better hope that these necks don't develop an upbow. Do you think I would be better off getting new rods, or should I be okay with these (I'm thinking 50 years of electric guitars can't be THAT bad, right)? Thanks for the input.

So I picked up a few inexpensive truss rods on ebay (the 17 1/2" version of these) to try on a couple builds I have going on. I was a little surprised when I got them because the nut is not welded on the end like most are on these kinds of rods. The nut will twist on and flex the rod just like you would expect, but when twisted the other way, the nut simply screws off. That worries me slightly because that means I am only getting the same amount of benefit as a one way rod. I know that guitars have been built for ages with one way rods, but I like the flexibility (pun intended) of having a rod that can go both ways. I was wondering if anyone has experience with rods like these. Do I need to weld the nut on or something? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

This is a question that is more or less impossible to answer. Mostly because you say best and what is best for me may not be best for you. However, here's my take on the different thicknesses. If you have a closed cab, the one made of heavier material is maintain better separation between what is being radiated off the front of the cones relative to what is being radiated off the back of the cones. This means you will have less interference, both constructive and destructive. Also, less energy is going into vibrating the cab, so therefore more will most likely be propagated into the room (and into the box). This is typically good, especially for bass frequencies, since your cab will have structural modes in the lower frequency region (typically). Here, however, is the wrench in the gears. Guitar cabs violate almost all rules of hi-fi design. The open backs create comb filter effects (in frequency), the speakers are generally not very wide-bandwidth, we drive the speakers into distortion, the box sizes are much smaller than what is typically "optimal" for hi-fi, and the materials used range from ply, to pine, to mdf to who-knows-what. In short, when it comes to guitars, there is very little about the "audio" (hi-fi) world that carries over well into the guitar world. For example, in college I showed a circuit snippet to my filter design professor and he said "why would you want to do that, it's going to distort like crazy." I said "Well, you see, I play the guitar." His response was "Aaaaahhhhh."

In theory, more mass means you should have a greater impedance through the transfer path of energy from string to body, which means energy stays in the string longer. However, this is if you are talking about the partial differential equation governing string motion. As soon as you stop dealing with a point mass and deal with a headstock that is nonhomogeneous (with many complex natural modes) and then imperfectly coupling a weight to it which itself has even more complex natural modes, it really doesn't have an amazingly dramatic effect. Will you see a difference? Maybe, but do you want to be playing with a 5 lb. weight dangling from the headstock? Then again, being a scientist, I won't tell you not to experiment, because that is the basis for all good science.