Jump to content

Gellfex

Members
  • Posts

    10
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Gellfex

  1. Thanks Ansil, but the 100k has been fine so far. My main technical problem has been the damn fancy 1/4 jack having loose connections so when the cord is pulled contacts weren't closing and the signal wasn't getting bypassed to the build in amp. I need to get a better quality one, this was the one that came on the pocket headphone amp. I should post a photo of the guitar, right now it still has the MDF body I made to work out the kinks, I have a slab of poplar to make a final body from.
  2. Thanks, that's interesting advice. I've never shot polyester although I've laid up plenty with glass. The automotive stuff usually has a green tint to it, but perhaps that's due the cobalt and other additive's they use. I haven't shot 2 part poly in ages, not since I used some Imron decades ago, really toxic stuff requiring a supplied air respirator. I have a pretty good spray booth and real respirators, so maybe that's a way to go. So you think tint & seal it with shellac and then top coat it urethane. But you don't think shooting the 1 part glossy floor product would give me a "good enough" finish given the beater nature of this instrument? I also suspect this will not be the last body I end up making for this one, he's only 12!
  3. Thanks Ihocky, that's pretty comprehensive. I'm not familiar with the tinting and dying products, can you give a few brand & product names? I guess I wasn't planning on a wet sanded finish, (I did plenty of that in my modelmaking days at the start of my career and hated it) maybe I could put the kid to work on his own guitar. But we sure didn't wait weeks to sand, hours at best, it was advertising! But I guess we didn't put on as many coats as you guys are describing. Like I said, I'm reluctant to put huge effort and material purchase/shipping expense into a finish likely to get more beat up than even the average guitar, despite the gig bag my mother has made for it. I guess I just have to decide among the options and it'll be what it'll be.
  4. I do appreciate the advice, but you're simply describing a "pro" quality level far above the job requirement! I'm not a luthier, but I am a self employed pro craftsman (entertainment industry) for 30 years. A big part of any job is identifying "how good does it need to be?" You can noodle any job to the point of diminishing returns and unprofitably. I have a cabinetmaker friend who's a marvelous craftsman but can't seem to make any money because he's unable to give quality appropriate to the price point. I've already put in more hours on my son's "inexpensive" Steinberger style travel guitar than I ever thought needed for taking a neck & hardware off a pawnshop Epiphone SG, making a body and machining a tuning tailpiece. I sure have learned a lot about guitar making, but given the low quality parts I doubt the finish quality will effect the sound much and the boy is going to beat the crap out of it anyway! The current version with an unfinished MDF prototype body is currently at camp with him, it didn't seem wise to do a new body beforehand. Given all that, is there a good reason why a sprayed or wiped oil polyurethane finish is a bad idea, assuming I can find a red enough stain?
  5. The tinting idea is interesting, but the 10 coats and month to cure + handwork sounds more like for a top line instrument than for a 1st build traveler. Maybe I can tint the oil urethane though.
  6. I've tried both Minwax red mahogany & red oak stains looking for that classic red SG color, and both are not nearly red enough, possibly due to the natural slight green tinge of poplar. I used to have a much redder mahogany but the mfr discontinued it. Do I need to use aniline dye, or is there some other line of stains I should look at? Also any comments about the most practical clear coat method would be appreciated. I do have a gravity fed HVLP gun and I was eying the can of "ready to spray lacquer" in the auto parts store. At $22 I suspect it's cheapest way to go except for a spraycan, but maybe I should go oil poly instead for a more durable finish, it's for a 12 year olds travel guitar.
  7. JohnH, REALLY interesting idea! Easy to do as I already have a 9V aboard for the headphone amp. The only downside I see is that it remains powered until you pull out the cable. I'm lucky if my 12 year old shuts off his amp, expecting him to pull the cord out when he's done may be too much. Maybe this too should get kicked down the road as a possible tweak on the final version. Ergonomics have also been occupying me this stage, trying to lay out jacks and pots on a very small field. The 1" Gibson knobs I believe are too big to be set so close, and I think I need to put the 1/8 headphone out jack on the top side of the body where it can't be confused with the 1/8 MP3 in. The amp I bought had RCA L-R inputs but they're a PITA, ugly, and big compared to using a simple male-male 1/8 stereo cord to the MP3. Does anyone know how bad it would be if the amplified MP3 signal accidentally went into the headphone amp output line?
  8. Thanks guys. After listening to it again I think I'm just going to leave it on the 500k for now and finish the guitar. Right now it's just a prototype of MDF. Then if the kid wants tweaks I can do them, the 100k is smaller dia than the 500k anyway. As for volume, he's been playing the prototype which just has the pickup wired directly to the jack and complaining about no volume pot. The prototype is worrisome in that it won't hold tuning. I'm hoping it's just the MDF and not my tuners, and the poplar body will be better. Rip, I actually had the 4PDT in my archives from decades ago, I'm a real packrat! Thursday my son's buddy came over with his strat but forgot a cord, so I said "give me a few minutes". I rummaged deep and found 2 1/4 plugs and an 8 ft piece of yellow shielded 4-18 leftover from a job and whacked it together. The kids were wowed.
  9. Hi all, really glad I found this site. I'm building a travel guitar for my son, basically a single pickup Steinberger style headless, but I'm embedding a headphone amp. I've wired up a 4pdt switch so when you turn on the pocket amp it switches the volume pot from external amp mode to internal amp mode. The trouble lies in the fact that the pocket amp wants it's original 100k volume pot and is unhappy with the 500k I've tried, it's range is all in the 1st 30 deg or so. I tried putting a 100k resistor in parallel with the pot, which should make it ~83k, but it curiously seems to have no affect whatsoever. So do I just use the 100k, lose brightness when it's plugged into a real amp, and it is what it is? Or is 100k simply too low? No one expects it to to be the best sounding guitar ever, I'm not a guitarist and this is my 1st build of one. I scavenged the neck and hardware off a pawn shop Epiphone SG and made my own design tuner tailpiece. The odd thing about it was the volume pots were linear and the tone audio! Did some Malaysian worker have an off day or was that deliberate? Any ideas on how to reconcile the 2 systems would be appreciated, it seems the amp pot is doing more than simple voltage dividing, and that's where my understanding of these things peters out.
×
×
  • Create New...