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Jehle

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Everything posted by Jehle

  1. That's what I've heard about Purple Heart, that it's tougher than most saw blades. I've often wondered about using it for bridge or nut material because of that reason.
  2. That's an interesting idea. I've been rewiring guitars for many years and I've never done an override switch like that. What I have done is replace the middle tone pot on the strat with a rotary switch which works with the middle position of the 5-pos toggle. All kinds of weird things are possible there. But, the 1st and 5th positions are the "default" neck and bridge PU's. I like the idea of overriding the volume knob as well. That's a cool idea.
  3. One of the slots in a metal eraser shield is perfect for laying across the fretboard while exposing just the fret. You can protect the wood on the fret board and dress up the fret. Plus you dont have to worry about masking tape goo sticking to the fretboard. Source, some ancient Guitar Player magazine. I used this technique to fix a few dented frets when I thought it would be "cool" to use the microphone stand as a slide. Never again...
  4. Pity it seems to be a lefty model. I play righty.
  5. I've been measuring fretboards to get an idea what shape and radius I like. I ran across this little gizmo at StewMac. It both measures fretboard radius, and helps to set the string hight at the bridge. Oh... a set of 8 of 'em too. Yummy. http://www.stewmac.com/cgi-bin/hazel.cgi?a...atalog/sku.html I'm still new to this so forgive me if this is old news...
  6. Excellent question and equally excellent answer. Thanks for the info guys. I'm in the soaking up every scrap of information that I can phase.
  7. Thanks Brian, I'm begining to see just how true that signature of yours is. You know all and see all.
  8. I've never completely removed the finish from a neck, but I have sanded it to a satin finish with some fine sand paper and then finished off with 000 steel wool. That got rid of that candy coating.
  9. I've profiled the back of my favorite neck and have discovered that it's a soft "V" shape. I have big hands so no surprise there. I want to use that profile with the fretboard radius of my other main guitar. It's another Fender and right at the year that the fretboard radius could be 9.5" or 12". How can I measure it to be sure? I've tried cutting out bits of cardboard with a compass and xacto knife with little luck. Is this the way it's done, or is there a better way? Thanks in advance.
  10. Dang. "Thank you Kevan." Looks like I've got a project to start this weekend. )
  11. I have a two piece neck (maple back / maple fretboard) and I would like to try to remove the maple fretboard and replace it with a 24 (or more) fret Pau Ferro or Rosewood fingerboard. Is there a way to separate the two pieces safely? For mere mortals even?
  12. Good point. The only problem is that the Carvin forum is going to be infested with loyal Carvin users. I think if I just ask "what do you think?" I'll get a million resonses about Carvin being the bomb, and all that. I'll lurk over there and see what I can find out though. Thanks for the tip.
  13. Thanks Brian. I assume that's the universal jem kits that you refer to and not the Carvins. Now I just need to decide which one to get. Strat... Tele... Strat... Tele... Tempting to go for the tele as I don't have one of those yet. Hmmmm. I have so many spare parts (tuners, and pickups included) that I should be able to change things out if I need to. Thanks for the tip there. I'll keep you posted on my progress. Need to order something first... Thanks again.
  14. Since I'm just getting started at this, I want to get a kit guitar first to get my feet wet. I've rewired guitars for years, I can do anything electronically. But now I want to experiment with body shapes, enhanced cut aways, fretboard radii, all that stuff. So....... I've been looking at different guitar kits on the web and have considered the Carvin Bolt kit which is pretty cheap for 330 bucks. But, now I see that www.universaljems.com has a strat type kit for 130! Is that too good to be true? Has anyone used one of these kits for anything? Any help is appreciated.
  15. Well, I've been playing guitars for a long time (20+ years) and I'm thinking about rolling my own guitar now after seeing that 7 string barritone. I really love the project guitar site and will be lurking for a while.
  16. The Problem More often than not, I work with a mix of old pickups on a single guitar and no two color codes ever seem to be alike from one pickup to the next. Given a pickup with an unknown color code for the wires, there are many ways to solder it in the guitar wrong and only one way to get it right. This is a technique that I use to figure out the color code for any pickup, and to make sure that I get all the pickups installed in-phase. What you will need: A pickup to testA metal screwdriverA pencil and paper to take notesA voltmeterAlligator clips The Solution The first thing I do is draw a simple picture of the pickup as it would be in the guitar. I draw two coils and note where the bridge is and where the neck is. That may seem silly, but it helps me to visualize what I'm doing. This also is a big help later for when I actually install the pickup in the guitar. With the alligator clip leads, I connect the voltmeter to two wires on the pickup. For this pickup I have a bare ground wire, plus Blue, Red, White, and Black. Just as a guess I tried Red and Blue first. The voltmeter is set to read VDC (Volts DC). To test each coil, tap the long side of a metal screwdriver all along the magnets on the top of one coil. Give it one good tap and watch the voltmeter. The Red and Blue wires didn't show any reading on the meter when I tapped either of the coils. This means that those two wires do not go together. I tried the Red and Black wires next. Now, when I tap the coil closest to the bridge, I get a positive reading. When I pull the screwdriver off, I get a negative reading. This tells me that I have the Red and Black wires in-phase for that coil. I make a note on my drawing. I know that the White and Blue wires are for the other coil, but I do not know what the correct phase is. I alligator clip the probes to the White and Blue wires and tap the coil closest to the neck now. When I tap the coil with the screwdriver, I get a negative reading on the voltmeter. When I pull the screwdriver off the coil, I get a positive reading. This tells me that I have the coil is hooked up out-of-phase. I just flip the colors and put that on my notes. Now that I have this pickup drawn out on paper, I know how to connect it for series or parallel, or hook it up to a switch. But that is another whole topic....
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