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dark_1

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About dark_1

  • Birthday 08/11/1987

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  1. I appreciate the help psw, and anyone else who helps. My circuit works with my guitar straight into it and the speaker but the sound coming from speaker is low. Yes I've checked the pinout on the transistor, even tried reversing it just in case. How should I connect my guitar signal? The jack has a tip, and a sleeve connection right? + tip and - sleeve? The way I have it connected right now I take the tip to the input and the sleeve to the ground on the circuit. Should I only connect the tip? and do I have my negatives and positives mixed up somehow? btw I checked the trim pots before installation and they worked. Both the volume and gain pots make a difference in the sound but only the bias pot doesn't seem to do anything. No I dont have the a suitable magnet for final installation yet. I have a ceramic bar magnet I've been using for testing purposes. Also some rare earth discs but like you said they're not the best. Have some other disc magnets but not sure the material. They're not ceramic and I don't think they're rare earth. They were just regular 'craft magnets' I picked up from an art supply store. As for the banana effect tried to avoid it with the clamps but couldn't get them to sit level so.. The last attempt with the bad wire looked really nice but when I undid the wire it threw the bobbin off a bit. Will definitely take more time and care next time.
  2. Well anyways.. I did a quick test last night. No sustain or anything. Pretty sure I just need to wire it all up properly probably just a bad connection somewhere. I still do have a concern though. I'm using the ruby/fetzer circuit and built it pretty much to exact specs. I think every components value matches the schematic. However the circuit on its own does not power my speaker. I checked my pickups and bridge reads about 8.7 kohms. The only way I can get any sound is if I run the circuit after the mono out from my boss gt-8. I was thinking maybe my speaker requires too much power and the circuit can't power it on its own. Its an 8ohm speaker but it is in a metal housing. Well anyways thats how I've been testing it so far since I don't wanna start desoldering the components in my guitar just yet. The whole loop looks like this.. guitar>gt-8 in> gt-8 out >ruby/fetzer ----------------> gt-8 headphone out > computer speakers/headphones (so I can hear the guitar signal) gt-8 has a bypass where I can just get it to send out the guitar signal or amplify it to the circuit. I'm using trim pots all my variable resistors on my circuit. The 'volume' control I've wired a trim pot with some short wires into header pins so I can replace with a proper pot once I'm ready for further testing. The trim pot to bias the fetzer transistor doesn't seem to make any difference at all. I haven't checked the voltage on the fet to bias it for 4.5v since I'm using 9v battery, I keep it about half, and don't really notice any excessive noise or anything. I will sooner or later just been kinda lazy. Here are some pics of my progress so far. http://img42.imageshack.us/i/20101019002.jpg http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/77/20101019005.jpg http://img839.imageshack.us/i/20101019006.jpg ok not the neatest build but not too shabby with my very basic tools =p and intended to be experimental. I will take much more care in a more final version.
  3. Ok well that was easy... Just finished winding with the new wire and first time I checked I got a reading of 8.5 ohms..undid a bit of the wire and its now sitting around 7.9..put some clamps on while it dries and its giving me a little higher reading (8.3). I'm going to leave it and see how it is when it dries and clamps come off.
  4. Well I didn't think the sustainer would work well in the hsh config. Will leave that thought for now. I will be going into computer engineering in the near future so maybe I will revisit the whole sustainer thing and see if there are any improvements to be made. I received my wire today but got home past midnight so no winding tonight, have to work early. I'm confident I know how to set the multimeter. I've tested hundreds of resistors.. For the coil, I set my multimeter to the lowest range which is 0-200 ohms. The next step up is 0-2Kohms.. I will try to make some time over the weekend to wind a new coil.. as for why it was shorting.. well the wire I had came coiled and glued already.. A coil with no core.. the wire read fine..only I had to unwrap it from the original coil as I wound my driver coil. I think the glue that was used was too strong as it seemed to be stripping the coating or maybe it was just **** coating.. basically the wire read properly on the original coil and even on my coil.. If i unwrapped some wire after getting a lower reading, the reading would jump back up.. I tried coating spots I thought might by shorting only to find out pretty much the entire length of the wire seemed to be missing coating since I could easily get a reading from it without scraping any coating.. The wire I received today looks promising.. It is solderable wire. Only kind I could find. Will that be a problem? I unwrapped the last coil I did a few minutes ago and it really was rock hard. Was left for about a week or so without me touching it. I had to use some water to loosen up the glue first or the wire would keep breaking. Still waiting for 4pdt switches. The most I could find locally were 3pdt but they were rocker switches.. I'm not sure who the volume knob statement was directed at.. I didn't fully read all the posts.. Its about 1:30 in the morning.. Heres how I want my setup to basically work.. pickups go to 4pdt.. in the on mode it splits the bridge to go to circuit and go to 3 way lever switch and lifts both hot and ground of the neck pickup and also powers on the circuit..off mode everythings normal, both pickups going straight to 3-way switch..then to volume and tone.. This way the guitar will have volume and tone pots..the third pot (originally tone pot) I will be replacing with a 100k push pull to use as the 'volume' of the circuit and the dpdt switch on it will be used for fundamental/harmonic sustain switch.. This way I only need to drill a hole for the 4pdt switch.. Hope that all makes sense. Its been a very long day.. by the way the vertical space on my bobbin is a tad over 3 mm..tad under 4..will that cause significant problems? Maybe I'll get around to posting some pics..
  5. Yea I'm still waiting for my wire. Couldn't find any locally so I had to order. With the wire I had before I ended up winding about 4 coils. They never got up to 8 ohms though. I would wind and wind but realized every few winds I was losing resistance. It would read lower than before. Highest I was able to get was between 5-6. I can only think that the wire was shorting. Checked the wire and the enamel coating was shotty since I could just clip on alligator clips to the wire and get a reading without scraping off the coating. Even tried the test probes in case the clips were cutting into the coating, same thing. I looked up the chemical datasheets for the glue I have and it is PVA. Even asked a friend studying chemistry to see if the coating and glue might be reacting. So think I'm safe there. I've been on hold for about a week and a half now. Even if I get the wire by the end of the week I don't know when I'll continue. Have some midterms coming up next week. Maybe on the weekend as a break from studying. My new guitar has an HSH config. PSW, how does your dual coil mid driver work? Can't seem to find the thread where you wrote a bit about it. Could you share some insight on your design as my new guitar does not have enough space to mount the driver anywhere. A very thin driver might work on top of the neck pickup.. but I would have to lower them and I'd rather keep my setup the way it is. I don't mind losing the mid pickup though. This will of course have to wait until I can get one working successfully for my old guitar. Which I wanted to sell but this project gave me a reason to keep the guitar. At least for experiments. I doubt I'll b playing it much since its so heavy and the licensed floyd was the reason I got it (wanted to get into trems without buying an expensive guitar in case I totally ****ed it or it wasn't my thing). My new ZR feels like butter in comparison. BTW, the sustain I mentioned earlier with my weak coil wasn't very good. The tests were done with me holding the coil above the strings. Yes it was sustaining since the sound did keep 'going' and would stop if I moved the driver away. This was only present on the 5th and 6th strings. Could not hear anything conclusive on the other strings.
  6. I'm still waiting on new wire to try rewinding. My circuit seems to be working ok. Have got it to sustain with a coil that read 5-5.5 ohms. Hopefully the new wire works and I can wind my bobbin with 8 ohms. In the meantime however I bought a new guitar =p
  7. I thought I might need to find better magnets. Well once I get the driver going I will see how they work, if not I'll find some ceramic magnets. I'm in Canada and when I asked around for PVA glue they were clueless, so I got some basic wood glue. They were all the same. Sorry about the blurry picture, I didn't check camera settings. The bottle says its white glue for wood, paper, cardboard, etc.. I'
  8. Let us know how it turns out. My amp circuit seems to be working ok. Waiting for the new wire I ordered to arrive so I can try winding the driver again. In the meantime I think I'll redo my bobbin. Last attempt I taped the core but didn't have enough wire left to do a full 8. Funny enough It reads 3 ohms now. Hoping the new wire gets here soon so I can wind the required 8 ohms. This is the glue I was using. Is it ok? http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/8404/20101004003.jpg I had ordered some very tiny magnets. They turned out smaller than I anticipated and don't seem very strong but have plenty of them. Since I don't have the tools to cut a ceramic magnet to size, I'm thinking of using these other ones I have. They are rare earth and pretty strong. I can fit the four of them across the length of my driver but with the 4th in place I need to hold them in place or the 4th mag usually flies off or flips and sticks to one of the others. This is what they look like.. http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/7830/20101004008.jpg Any suggestions/comments? I'm pretty much stuck right now since I have no wire..
  9. Well built the fetzer ruby circuit. It works but I'm having some volume issues. Maybe my pickups are very weak but I tried switching the 68k resistor for a ~30k and no noticeable improvement. Maybe the speaker I'm testing with just needs some more power. Amplifying my guitar through my boss gt-8 gave me enough volume and the signal from my guitar was clearly audible. As for the driver, the wire I ordered came in spools of 100 or 200 ft, don't remember which it was. Anyways, the wire is just coiled and held together with some sort of glue, not on a physical spool of any sort. I'm now thinking that this glue is causing the enamel coating to come off as I unwind the wire to wind onto my 'bobbin'. I tried winding with the last bit of wire I had left without using any glue and when I was done it only read 1ohm. Before winding it read 5... Could it be that I need significantly more wire because the resistance goes down when wrapped around my bobbin? I wouldn't think so, but I'm no expert. I have ordered more wire from a different source which seems to be on an actual spool. Hope its not glued on. Anyways I stuck a big bar ceramic magnet onto the 1ohm coil and was able to get some sustain while holding it in front of the strings. Nothing really from the thin strings (b and e) but I could hear it sustain from the others and even go into harmonics eventually or when I switched the wires around. So anyway to boost the signal from the fetzer/ruby or should I not really be able to hear much when I connect a speaker. The speaker I used is an 8ohm speaker I bought for $1. Its got a metal casing and about 1.5 inches in diameter. I don't know anything else about it since the only markings on the speaker are 8ohm and +, - for the terminals. Some help or input would really be appreciated.
  10. Yea well actually I found .5 and .1 uf electrolytics. I think theyre electrolytic, they look like the rest of the electrolytics I have and were polarized. I did however go back and find some that arent polarized and look to be ceramic so I'm hoping my circuit will work when I build it. Still having problems with my driver coil. I should have about 10 ohms worth of wire wrapped around but I only checked once I wrapped it. Now I get a reading of about .7ohm. Could it be that I need to tape or coat the metal bar I'm wrapping the wire around? After the first failed attempt, I unwrapped the wire and the metal bar had some rust on it that wasnt there before. I'm thinking It's either the wood glue or wire somehow reacting. I used epoxy to glue plastic pieces on the top and bottom but there was no rust for the two days before I started wrapping wire around it. Maybe if I cant fix my coil today I will just tape the metal bar before putting top and bottom plastic pieces on and coil the wire without glue. I have a wax pot at work but I dont think it uses paraffin wax. Maybe I can just dunk it in there for a few to counter the vibrations.
  11. Nice pics. Seeing your driver, you might just be able to squeeze some wood glue on it and sort of compress the windings down. Once it dries stretch some electrical tape over it really tight. That should help. As for how I want to wire it, I will be using a 4pdt switch(on order from ebay). 2 of the common terminals(middle) will connect neck hot and ground so I can totally disconnect the pickup when not in use. One will switch bridge hot sustainer and also split it there to continue to volume pot or go direct to volume pot. The last set of terminals will be on/off for the circuit. I'll try and post a schematic later. I also have some push/pull pots coming that I'll be using to switch between the harmonic mode. I ordered a 100k pot so I can use it for volume of the driver as well. My guitar has 2 vol and one tone right now. I'm going to take out the tone and put the push/pull there and reduce the other 2 vol pots so I have 1 vol and 1 tone. This way I only need to drill one hole for the 4pdt switch. One thing I'm not sure on is how do I connect the ground from the circuit to the ground from my guitar. Is it as simple as just connecting a wire from the guitar ground to the circuit ground? Or is there something I'm missing. Now my driver that I tried to wind last night. Well ran into some problems with shorts. Tonight I will just wind about 150 turns or so and then check. Also last night I had the wire break on me. Since it was a test coil I tried soldering it back together and got some nail enamel to coat the wire with to stop it from shorting. PSW stated in some thread that the glue will be fine to protect from shorts but didnt work so well for me. I also got some more capacitors for the circuit. I'm still waiting on some tiny rare earth mags I ordered but i have a big ceramic bar to test with and some other rare earth disc magnets. I'm trying to make a very slim driver and squeeze it in between the neck and neck pickup. I measured about 7mm space there, can probably squeeze about 8mm.
  12. How do you have your pickups and sustainer wired in your guitar? I think I have a pretty good grasp on how to do it but will never know until I try. Can you draw up a simple schematic of your wiring?
  13. Well the thing is its hard for me to make time to go to the stores here for them. I checked the source(radio shack) for ceramic capacitors. They have a variety pack but I didnt see the values I need. On top of that it was $8. I think I can make time between school and work tomorrow. I havent actually built the circuit yet. I tried it on breadboard but didnt get anything happening. Maybe I need to connect the ground from the guitar or something. Will be building it on perfboard so wanted to make sure about the caps. I guess I'll wind the driver tonight, and yes I bought wood glue to pot it. I'm thinking of hooking it up to an mp3 player or my amplug to test it if it dries tonight. Hope to be posting some pictures soon. About your potting question, I think wax is fine but I believe you need to use paraffin wax and it should be the same process as potting a pickup. Dump it in the wax and wait till the bubbles stop or maybe you can just squeeze some glue into it now. I've never done a pickup so I wouldnt know. Other more knowledgeable people here can probably answer this better than me. This is my first attempt at building a sustainer. If I'm successful I might try winding my own pickups, the stock ones I use arent very good.
  14. Hi, I thought I'd post here since this thread is about help with sustainers. Right now I have my winder bobbin made and just waiting to wrap wire. I'm working on building the Fetzer-Ruby circuit but I only have electrolytic caps for it (well all except the 22nF). Now my question is will it work with the caps I have, as long as I keep the polarity correct or do I need ceramic caps for the other non-polarized caps in the circuit? I have circled the ones in question, red for the ones for which I only have polarized electrolytic caps.
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