jnewman

It looks like you have everything wired correctly except for the output jack, which is wired totally wrong . If you pick up a guitar cable and look at the plug on the end, the pointy tip end should carry magnetic pickup signal, the middle ring should carry piezo signal, and the sleeve (the part closes to the cable) should be ground. The way you have your jack wired in the schematic is tip ground, ring magnetic, piezo sleeve. Plug a cable into the jack, look at how it connects. Unfortuantely, my laptop broke yesterday and I don't have any way to get my digital camera pictures on to the internet, so you'll have to deal with my very poor MS Paint skills. Here's a picture of how it should go:

I'm actually not sure. I don't think touching the minitoggles would make the guitar hum, but I could be wrong. I don't think touching them makes the headphone amplifiers I've built hum, and I never grounded them there (although I did ground the volume pot).

Well, you can have both coils of a humbucker in an out-of-phase position with any 4-conductor (standard) humbucker, although it'll stop being hum-cancelling. You can't have two coils both in phase and out of phase and hum cancelling in each, as in one phase their noise signals oppose and in one they reinforce, you just have to decide which will be which. Also, positions 2 and 4 on a strat aren't actually out-of-phase, they're two in-phase signals in parallel and won't sound much like a humbucker that you put out-of-phase. You'd be better off having a series/parallel switch, probably, if you're trying to get something close to positions 2/4 (you'll be the closest to 4, obviously). You could have a three-way switch that gave you normal humbucker, coils in parallel (position 4-ish), and one coil split (single-coil-ish). The second two sounds won't be exactly like strat sounds, but they'll at least have that sort of character. EDIT: If you had a middle single coil, you could use it to get moderately close to strat position 4. The biggest reason a parallel humbucker doesn't sound like position 4 is that the coils aren't far enough apart to have pretty different harmonic signatures. The only difference would arise from the fact that the one coil used from the humbucker is different from a single coil. You could do something like the PRS 513 and have two single-coils in the bridge and a middle single coil, then replace the neck position with your sustainer, but then you wouldn't have exactly a humbucker sound either - it's all little tradeoffs. /EDIT I don't think you'll ever be able to get good neck pickup tone from a lead pickup because the basis of the neck pickup tone has nothing to do with the pickup itself - it has to do with the different distribution of harmonics (specifically, the distribution of harmonics is more weighted towards the low end in the neck pickup and more towards the high end on the bridge pickup) and greater string travel the further you get from the bridge. There's a good deal of discussion on this if you look around for it, even people who've very carefully measured the individual harmonic levels for bridge and neck pickups all the way up the fretboard. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I saw that now.

That's possible, but I wouldn't think it'd make much difference... as someone who's spent a lot of time shooting old shotguns, a walnut stock 20ga with a thin hard resin butt plate really starts to kill my shoulder after a while, but a walnut stock 12ga with a hard rubber (pretty stiff but still a lot more give than the resin one) butt plate only about 1/2"-3/4" thick I can shoot all day with no trouble. These are both old over-unders about the same weight and there's no recoil compensation or anything with either. With proper shooting form, how hard the wood is shouldn't make much difference, your shoulder is supposed to get pushed by and move with the gun, not get hit by it, and a softer butt plate just conforms better to your shoulder and spreads out the push.

On my Fender American Strat, it's THICK on the fretboard. I'd just as soon it wasn't, because I want it to start looking like the guitar from the cover of "layla and assorted love songs" . I wouldn't worry too much about lacquer on the fretboard killing sustain or tone, but I'm not an expert.

Yours and the Ibanez's aren't exactly the same... but it's too late at night for me to figure out what the differences are .

Wait... why wouldn't that work with a DPDT switch? If you just moved the wires attached to the outside set of poles to the center bottom lugs, wouldn't it work the same way?

a few days without water has.how about a few days of the flesh eating virus?few days of nuclear holocaust? i think you get the picture ← Heh. True, I suppose.

Eh, I don't know if grounding the switches is really that necessary, as they're mostly plastic and almost all the metal is the switching hardware itself (which obviously you can't ground, or the switch stops working).

Ya thats what I thougt. I've seen a guitar like that before. Check it out, BURLY Click me the pics. ← That thing looks like my dog gnawed on it. ← I think it might be the coolest guitar top I've ever seen!

Um, have you driven a Mercedes in the last five years? Utter pile of junk. ← I have a friend who owns a garage that works exclusively on Mercedes cars. He does a lot of work on classics but also works on the current models, and he's so disappointed with them and their reliability that he's actually started telling people (with no ifs, ands, or buts) not to buy a new Mercedes. He says they've basically become disposable cars that you can only drive for a couple of years before they croak. That said, my parents have an '88 Mercedes that's a great car that I think you could drive until the apocalypse without doing it much harm. Oh, and you're one lucky *******, man - that's a great deal . A few days never killed anyone.

Actually, all you need is a SPST (single pole single throw) switch, as you're only switching one signal, although a DPST will work just as well. There's only one signal you're switching here, so you just need one switch element (single pole). If you were trying to have indicator LED's as well as pickup switching or something (two signals), then you'd need two switching elements (double pole). And ON/ON is indeed ON/OFF depending on how you wire it. It's just the silly way that they name the things that's confusing.

By the way... Channel lock's are pretty nice, actually. They're good tools.

What kind of amp is it? Is it possible one of your tubes is giving up the ghost? Did your guitar volume get turned down? Are you sure none of the settings have changed?

DPDT stand for Double Pole Double Throw. Double Pole means there are, essentially, two separate switches. Double Throw means that there are two individual terminals that may each be connected to the input terminal (these are the "on" and "momentary" positions). An "On-On" DPDT switch would work fine for this application. You connect one out terminal to the volume pot and the second to nothing (or to ground), and then the connected terminal is an on position and the unconnected (or grouned) terminal is an off position. In the naming system, "ON" is just used to show a position where a terminal may be connected, "OFF" is a position with no corresponding terminal, and "MOMENTARY" is, as you've found, a position with a terminal but it won't stay there. There is no such thing as a DPDT "ON-OFF" switch - or rather, it's not called that. If it's an "ON-OFF", then there's only one throw as there is only one output terminal, and then it's a single throw switch and there's no need to name its switch positions as there's always only a "in and out terminals connected" and "in and out terminals disconnected" position. Here's a picture of how it should be wired:

There are a couple ways of doing guitar finishes: 1. Solid paint (usually car paint) that you can't see the wood through. 2. Stain the wood, clear laquer (in which case you use aniline dyes, which you should be able to get shipped there as they don't count as hazardous materials). This lets you see the wood as well as possible and really highlights the grain if you do it right. 3. Use laquer with tints added to it (in which case you also use aniline dyes, which you should be able to get shipped there as they don't count as hazardous materials). You can still see the wood but the darker the color you do the more it obscures the grain. You can get aniline dyes as powders, which'd probably be your best bet, and you usually dissolve 'em in water for direct application to wood (so that they evaporate slowly and get a nice, even color with no splotches) and in alcohol/mineral spirits to mix in with lacquer (so that it'll dissolve fully into the lacquer). Decide which way you want to do it and make sure the aniline dyes you order can be dissolved that way.

If I had to guess, I'd say the spots where you put huge blobs of solder over the (entire) shielded pickup wire melted through the insulation under the shield and has shorted the hot wire to ground. If that's the case, you'll have to take it all apart, cut off the last inch of pickup wire, and start over. And NEVER solder the shield of a shielded wire like that. Cut the shield away and JUST solder the shield. Doing it that way is just asking for trouble.

Are you going to have a long-tenon (where the neck wood goes under the front pickup cavity and maybe even further back)?

Have you ever actually played a fretless guitar? Just curious...

There've been more anti-truss rod threads lately. First of all, why do you think it will improve sustain? As to your question, the truss rod has nothing to do with the stiffness of the neck. The truss rod is simply a way to adjust the bow of the neck, which changes with string size, temperature, humidity, etc. You can of course make a neck without a truss rod, and carbon rods'll help keep the neck from flexing too much, but it'll still flex and without a truss rod you won't be able to adjust the bow so that the neck is perfectly flat or has a slight relief. It may stay kind of close to right or it might not, and you won't have a way to fix it - you'd end up having to pick out the string gauges that got the neck the closest to straight.

Speaking of hardware - there's JUST enough neck angle that a ruler across the fret tops just sits in the string slots if the schaller roller bridge is sitting flat on the face of the guitar. I guess I still need to route out a tiny pocket for it, but it couldn't possibly need more than an eighth of an inch, so I guess I'll be doing about that much. Also, should I countersink the little flanges around the tops of the studs for the bridge, or just let them sit resting on the surface of the guitar?

Well, I still haven't managed to get back into the shop for any appreciable amount of time, so I haven't been able to get a lot done with only the tools in my dorm room - I did finish the fretting though, and finished up the body and neck contouring and sanding to 100 grit (not doing any finish sanding until after the routing's done). Here's a picture of the guitar as it currently stands (or lies on my bed ):

I bought some barts from pickupcentral. It's the best pickup shop I've ever dealt with and I'd recommend it to anyone.

If you really want to try to make it playable, you should probably make it a tele-ukelele (4 string short scale). You can buy alnico V single coil pole-pieces from stewmac and make your own bobbin parts from the dark bottom plastic parts of CD cases, you'll also need some magnet wire. There's some information around on wiring pickups, it's not actually too hard.

For this kind of thing you really want an on-on (or on-none-on which is the same thing) DPDT switch. Connect all the pickup grounds together. Each pickup's hot wire goes to the center terminal on one side of the switch. Then, the side of the switch you want to have as the "on" position gets soldered to the volume pot. When multiple switches are turned on, the pickups will be in parallel, when a switch is turned off, the whole pickup is at ground potential and there's no connection to the hot side of the audio signal. With those funny switches, you could just wire each side of the switch to the volume pot, in which case your idea about "on-off-preview" would work. With the stereo jack, in audio applications the tip is left, center ring is right, and part nearest the cable is ground. How you connect it depends on how you want the other end to connect to an amp. You're probably best off making the tip the magnetic pickups, the ring the piezo, and the shaft the ground. This will let you use a normal guitar cable with the guitar to use the magnetic pickups. I've never actually owned a guitar with magnetics and a piezo, but you'll probably need a cable that splits to two mono cables, one for magnetic and one for piezo, or a box that does the splitting for you. That's a really pretty guitar, by the way!