mistermikev

3 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

I've used some Italian made paper sold at a nearby "inexpensive" hardware store. I've also used the Mirka Abranet mesh wet.

A drop of dishwashing soap helps preventing gumming. And of course a light hand is a must! Even with water the friction can produce enough heat to burn the sugar in the wood dust to a gum. The finer the paper, the more friction there is.

thanks for the reply biz.  I do use the dishwashing soap and all.  when nitro is only a week old it gums up no matter what and that's fine... but the abrassive-ness of the 3M stuff, even on cured finishes... just seems to turn south on even the sides of paper I'm not using after just a few applications.  I think it has more to do with the paper it's on.  

Good paper is well worth the money in my experience.  When I worked at a cab shop we used this dura gold stuff for all the da sanders and that stuff would last a long time... I recently aquired some 400 grit sticky back for my fret level bar and it is great.  also some sanding pads and I find that I can start with 220 instead of 150 because the stuff is just so abrasive right out the gate.  

Did find some dura gold wet sand 800 and ordered that on amazon... will see if it's any better.  Going to look into mirka because I've heard that name before.  Thanks for the tip.

light hand... have you seen my mits?  no such thing here!!  hulk smash!

learning to sand light... in every context is a must.  when you sand hard on anything it actually just heats up the paper and also takes things out of flat real quick.  I am aware that sanding light is actually faster than trying to sand hard - but it's a good point and thanks for bringing it up.

really starting to look like a guitar (this is the best part!).  Excited for you.

afa angle... you might want to just lay your parts out as best as possible and use some string to see what is going to happen.  Whether you need a shim or not is going to come down to how thick the neck is and how deep the pocket is.  Even on production made guitars that are 5/8"depth per spec and necks that are 3/4" + fretboard... there is a surprising amount of wiggle between one mans 5/8 and anothers'.  Long story long... solve that problem once you know you have it

afa sides... while gaps on the side of neck pocket are not ideal... there are lots of great new and vintage guitars that have them to some degree or another.  If the neck screws are tight the neck isn't going to move.  that said - very few of us here would be happy with that (think I can speak for y'all).  

as an easy fix... you can just glue multiple pieces of veneer in there until the neck fits.  assuming you use the sm veneer on either side it will center the neck... but again doing a moch up might be a good idea because depending on your bridge/pickups center might not be where you want it.

look fwd to build pics.

I usually go to the auto zone or other and get it... I believe it's 3M brand but it sure seems to loose it's grit fast.  Just wondering what others are using for wetsand paper?  Primarily I'm interested in 400 - 1000 grit. 

I have micro mesh and it's great for higher grits... but wouldn't want to use that to level out initially because I suspect it would just get gummed up fast.  I like it quite a bit for 1k and up polishing... but I'd be interested to know what y'all use there too.  

On 10/1/2021 at 10:19 AM, nakedzen said:

Sanded the green back to 320 grit, dyed again with less blotchiness, shellac and couple coats of oil on now.

The ss frets I got from my friend for the guitar were ready cut pieces with no radius. Hmm. Let's see how a small amount of Titebond on the tang plus clamps for 30 minutes works. So far so good, pretty slow going though.

that green is quite handsome.  

just a suggestion - if you want easy... it just can't be gloss!  I have often wanted to just do tru oil on a body and stop there.  it will protect well enough and if you don't overdue it... ie just maybe 3 or 4 coats - it makes for a nice flat finish.  I can never stop there tho... it's a matter of self control!!

nice work nicco.  some nice details there like the pickups covers and cavity covers.

afa magnets... damned if I didn't have the sm issue.  Getting bigger magnets means bigger cavity and not exactly idea.  Seems the next available step up in size is too big... so in my case I resigned myself to deepening the mag holes and stacking two mags each in there.  If I'm wrong... and you happen to find some that are maybe just a hair stronger (mine were n52) or just slightly larger - feel free to enlighten me!

afa nuts... generally speaking they make them a hair large so you can sand them down or file them to suit.  I always just take a piece of sandpaper and rub it back and forth... constantly flip it so I don't end up taking it out of square.  Then I keep checking it on the guitar and pulling back out and sanding some more until it's really close.  I don't like to wear out my good files any more than necc.  

I always touch up the slots with good files at the end because it seems sl0ts are hardly every perfect from the factory so just leave myself enough room to take off some with a few passes on the file.  Feels like this is also less work (sanding then filing as opposed to just filing then having to potentially remove material fromt he top of the nut.

if I'm telling you all stuff you know... forgive!  just trying to be helpful.

1 hour ago, ADFinlayson said:

1920s radio, that suits my playing style and helps mask the bum notes.

sm here for sure.  when you need THAT tone... out of phase is THE thing to have.

1 hour ago, ADFinlayson said:

Something else I noticed about that diagram, whenever I've attempted to ground the pickups on the switch like that instead of back fo the pot, I've always got massive hum. That might just be down to my lack of knowledge on circuitry but I've never had good results doing that.

well... should be able to ground fine... as ultimately it is ground thru the 'out to vol pot casing'.  i can tell you that this wiring scheme would have a fair amount of hum (in specific positions) even if well grounded tho.

1 hour ago, ADFinlayson said:

pos 2 and 4 on the modern widing .ie.

2. both slugs in parallel 
4. bridge hum and neck slug in parallel 

gives plenty of strat quack without as much volume loss or hum IMO.

I did add a mini toggle on my last build so I could split have just the slugs on the neck or bridge but it only sounded any good under gain once I added a couple of resisters into it. I think I put a 1.5k on the bridge and a 2.2 on the neck, or the other way round possibly. 

afa both slugs in parallel pos2 - well that is one of the 'good' positions for sure.  inside coils in parallel. 

pos4... might be less hum than a single by itself... but crank some gain thru that and you are going to hear more hum than the typical humbucker... just doesn't even make sense.  might as well give all four coils there or any other balanced option imo.  if it works for ya great.

That said I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that the old prs wiring was where it's at.  

afa splits... and "just slugs" well... perhaps the pickups were not like the old ones.  if you tried just slugs w the typical seymour set... you'd get two out of phase coils which sounds like a 1920s radio with loads of hum.  

21 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

Interesting, I'm personally not a fan of that wiring either. pos 2 and 4 with just a single split humbucker sound a bit meh.

right on.  better off just having a 3-way toggle at that point imo.  someday when I build a prs style prob do a super switch and slight variation on older style wiring.  Really is the cats meow imo.

15 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

Ah I see what you're getting at. I just assumed you were talking about the wiring on the modern ones with the 5 way blade. I don't really understand how the inside vs outside wiring works on the above diagram but then the 5-way rotary wiring makes no sense to me.

right on, the blade, or "superswitch" - is really no dif than the rotary.  just a 4 pole 5 throw switch.  could do the sm wiring on either rotary or superswitch.  the modern wiring on that is silly imo.  not a fan of 3 single combos (pos 3 below - hums and not particularly intersting) nor a single coil from humbucker by itself (pos 2 below hums and does not sound at all like magnetic poles).  IDK what the heck they were thinking there but... two each his/her own.  the single advantage to that wiring seems to me to be that the wiring itself is fairly simple.

for reference:

27 minutes ago, curtisa said:

Yes, I can confirm that the older 5-way rotary switching scheme is fully humbucking in all positions, but I'd have to open mine up to verify how it's done and what wire colour goes where. There's probably someone out there that's already done the hard work on reverse engineering the wiring on the older CU22 and 24 rotary-switched scheme.

right on - thank you very much for confirmation. 

if it's(yours) eighties... perhaps one of these (below) - most do at least one inside coils combo ("parallel single coil" and/or "series single coil").

Idk if prs has changed how they wire their pickups... but as I understand throughout the 80s/90s the whole deal was that their neck pickup was wired different and that def caused some confusion amongst folks trying to work on them or replace pickups.  I believe that would have meant reverse polarity reverse wind relative to the bridge pickup as that's the only way you are going to get screw coils on the outside and ability to do inside vs outside coils w hum cancellation.  of course these were all 3 conductor wiring schemes.

I have a number of sets of older seymour two conductor pickups and dredging this all up has me really thinking about trying to open them up and run a whire from that series link... but that'd def be a gamblers run!

edit: has me thinking over here... if i had three conductor pickups... and they had the rev wind rev pol on the neck... just connecting those two series wires together in one position on a push pull would effectively give inside vs outside coils on a three way because the live wouldn't connect to the opposing pickup in either extreme of the 3-way and the grounds would be static.    edit edit - nah... it'd result in 3 coils on as the grounds are static... hmm...

ah, this was the one I was looking for... the prs 513 wiring.  I've kind of always given prs the credit for coming up with the idea of inside vs outside coils... there may have been folks who came up with it earlier but they certainly made it popular.  I remember working at a music shop the first time I saw this wiring... some issues w a guitar and boss asked me if i could fix it (I could not!).  was intimidated as all get out by the complexity of the rotary.  

anywho, my goal was not nec to copy this diagram... but to improve upon it.  basically you get many of these same combos but they are on the 3-way so in theory it overcomes the thing folks hated about this wiring: that it was hard to see where you are and get back to a simple bridge or neck sound.

also... afa all you can do is ground - if you look at above drawing it's showing three conductor setup and yes... grounding both series links from screw coils gives you outter coils in parallel.  one could have added positions to send the series link to the other pickups live link and this in fact would give you outter coils in series so it is possible.

2 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

From my experience PRS pickups don't feature inside vs outside coil splitting, pretty sure it's just both slug coils in pos 2, certainly isn't hum cancelling. Most of them are 3 conductor so all you can do is ground the screw coil. And from what I understand about their newer fancier "TCI" pickups and the older 408s , it's still a 3 conductor pickup with 4th wire being a tap so the slug coil is tapped in humbucking mode and not tapped when the screw coil is grounded, making it a phatter single coil. On my Pauls Guitar with the 408s, the split coil was actually pretty damn noisy. So the TCI part of it is just resisters for tuned coil splits to reduce hum a bit. 

That is just my interpretation so I might be totally wrong, in which case, tell me to bore off.

i can't speak to what they do nowadays... but back in the day when the rotary switch was much more common they def did inside vs outside and it was def hum cancelling. 

below is a nice summary of dif schemes through the years.  

-------------------------------------------------------------------

V2 wiring from a mid 1988 Sig
10 – 9.69 (treble)
9 – 13.52 ( MODIFIED power out of phase, just one coil of bass against both coils of treble)
8 – 8.83 (2 coils in series)
7 – 2.30 (strat sound)
6 – 7.99 (bass)

’85 to mid ’87

10 – treble PU
9 – both pickups together out of phase aka ‘power out of phase’ (NB the early wiring is different to the later power out of phase wiring)
8 – both pickups in parallel, in phase
7 – inner (slug) coils of both humbucker pickups in parallel
6 – bass PU


Mid ’87 to circa mid ’89

As above except

9 – both pickups out of phase BUT one coil of the neck pickup out of phase against BOTH coils of the treble pickup (my experience is this is a much hasher sound than the original out of phase wiring)
8 – inner (slug) coils of both humbucker pickups in series (replaces previous both pickups in parallel, in phase, wiring)

Post circa mid ‘89

This version is the same as the mid ’87 to circa mid ’89 wiring , EXCEPT position 9 power-out-of-phase changes. However I’ve not owned a guitar with this wiring, so I’m not 100% sure what power out of phase changes to.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

here is a diagram showing...

27 minutes ago, curtisa said:

Admittedly there's caveats and trade-offs to any suggestions. My first idea is effectively the same as your option of flipping the magnet in the pickup, but carries the proviso that you need to live with the look of the pickup being upside down. It does, however, save you dismantling the pickup to get to the magnet which may be off-putting to some people. If you're not adept and aware of the inner workings of pickup disassembly/reassembly there's every chance you might write off a perfectly decent Seymour Duncan humbucker in the process. 

The second option should also work, but introduces other phasing issues in certain pickup combinations. Indeed, I had to use it recently on an HSS-equipped guitar, where the split-bridge pickup sound when combined with the middle single gave humbucking performance but not the typical Strat-position-2 'quack' sound I was after. Reversing the coil order and tapping the opposite coil on the humbucker fixed the issue without having to worry about flipping magnets or rotating the pickup around. But as you note, it could have unusual tonal effects on an HH guitar if you also want to retain the 'normal' bridge-bridge/neck-neck humbucker switching pattern in addition to the humbucking inner/outer coil tap positions.

funny thing - I have ruined a few pickups trying to change from 2 conductor to 4... but have flipped/changed mags quite a few times w no issue -but I hear ya - any time you mess with pickup wire there is probably a 40%+ chance of disaster in even experienced hands.  

Option1: instead of flipping neck pickup could just use two bridge pickups, which I've done... you can get inside vs outside but don't get slugs vs screws and on a les paul with covers this just doesn't look right IMO. 

Option2: With just normal seymour set you can get the right look but you'll get 1/3 vs 2/4 and no screws vs slugs. 

Option3: this way -which is not only a hair sketchy and potentially will not sound as 'big' in the middle position... but if someone ever tries to replace that pickup w something else it would be some mental gymnastics (including myself 2 years down the road!).  On the bright side it should have the biggest tonal variation as the pickup separation is there and some say there are minor audible differences between slugs/screws... and it does "look right".  

so as always... pluses and minus's... so just another option.  

thank you again... at the least the exercise has cemented phase/polarity a bit more in my mind.

10 hours ago, Prostheta said:

+1 on steak for the occasional treat

CNC isn't the magic bullet that a lot of people think it is, however it does allow you to re-imagine processes and approaches to building. I couldn't rely on it solely, as my general skills would die a death. It has to be regarded as an opportunity to try things that might otherwise not be possible, or to bend your thinking down new avenues. I love it, especially the 5-axis stuff. Everything needs to be a challenge on some level, otherwise I'm just existing within my skillset and not progressing. But as I said, you can't go 100% CNC otherwise you end up losing many practical working skills by not maintaining them.

I worked as woodworker/solid surface fab on and off out of high school up until 2006... never really touched a router till I started building guitars a few years ago.  just pointing out - was surprised how much was still in my dna, then again I hear ya: I was very timid getting back into it!!

cnc... I was just saying it CAN do any job my other tools can do... not necc that it should or is even efficient at it!

neck is looking really great/clean.  lovely.

4 hours ago, curtisa said:

Or if you have enough slack on the pickup cable, can live with one Seymour Duncan logo appearing upside down and the slug/screw polepieces appearing in the same order as the bridge pickup, just spin the neck pickup around 180 degrees. Admittedly that probably only works best if you have a pickup that looks the same if oriented either way up, such as a Dimarzio with hex polepieces and the same colour bobbins.

Another alternative is to swap the connection order of the two coils in the wiring. There's no reason why the start winding of a coil on either north or south has to be the one that feeds the 'hot' wire of the circuit in order for a humbucker to buck the hum. Using SD wiring colours, Black (hot) -> White -> Red -> Green (ground) will work the same as Red (hot) -> Green -> Black -> White (ground), but will reverse the phase of the whole pickup by 180 degrees and allow you to tap the opposite magnetic polarity coil if you want without rotating the pickup or magnet, Again, the limitation here is that if you want two humbuckers to sound a certain way when combined (say the neck+bridge position on an LP) it won't work, but it can be useful if you're trying to split a humbucker in combination with a middle single coil for that inbetween Strat-type sound, and the middle single isn't reverse wind/reverse polarity relative to the humbucker coil you're trying to split with.

thank you for the reply sir and the thoughts. I appreciate the challenge because honestly this is something that has made my head spin for a while and mulling over it only firms up my understanding so thanks for that.

I'm not sure either of those options accomplishes what I was setting out to accomplish... but perhaps that's due to a lack of my defining that.  the goal is to be able to run both screw coils at the sm time, or both slug coils at the sm time... and get hum cancellation.  the additional constraint is that it needs to be inside coils vs outside coils ie a larger vs smaller spread between coils. 

so... if we just flip the pickup... and try to run both screw coils at sm time... we'll have two fwd wound fwd polarity singles screw coils (using fwfp as the arbitrary word to describe the first coils).  in the opposite position we'd get to rwrp slug coils.  additionally, if we flip the neck pickup (for instance) the two screw coils won't be "outside" but rather it would go screw, slug, screw slug... so we'd get less seperation ie 1/3 vs 2/4 coils and we wouldn't get hum cancellation as we haven't flipped polarity AND winding.  

in the second option... we are changing coil order only.  this would be a good option if we were trying to use the middle to wires to ground and give us a split humbucker + hum cancellation... but when we split that way we get one screw coil and one slug coil...and again you wouldn't get outside vs inside.  also might be the right option (as you mention) in a hsh config.  This is also pretty much exactly what I'm doing in my typical rotary wireup with stacked coils.  red -> gree for instance is still the sm winding direction.

I think this may or may not present an achilles heal to the idea I'm presenting above... which is... if you've got the neck two coils in series... but both neck singles have had winding AND polarity flipped... what happens in the typical lp middle position with the two sets of two coils in series?  On the one hand... the bridge 2 will hum cancel on it's own, and the neck 2 will hum cancel on their own... but combining all 4 may have some sort of phase/polarity artifact or at least I seem to recall this happening on some other winding/polarity safari!

hoped someon might find this interesting/useful

inside vs outside coils like a prs... but from seymour duncan pickups...

with semour - the neck bucker is wired exactly the same: fwd wind, fwd polarity (relative) as the bridge.  the physical wires for the neck come out on the opposite side -ie the pickup is flipped- so you get screw coils on the outside. 

so given the pair is wired exactly the sm... when you split both humbuckers (using typical red+white to ground) you'll get both outside coils active... but we don't get hum cancellation.

one way to get around this is to take either pickup and physically flip the magnet, then to wire the pickup exactly reverse to the other.  ie one goes live->black->white->red->green->ground while the other goes live->green->red->white->black->ground.

this wireup takes advantage of that modification such that in (down) normal position on the push pull... you get normal lp operation.  pull up and you get outside coils in the bridge position, and inside coils in the neck position.  Sort of gives you a "tele in combined mode" in the bridge vs a "strat position 2" in the neck.  IMO - much more useful single coils sounds that both feature hum cancelling.

40 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

You do love a good jig though!

lol... wut u tryin' a say??!  ok, i do.

1 hour ago, ScottR said:

Thanks man.

It made an awful noise when it hit........

SR

I can imagine.  it could've been a LOT worse right!?

nothing to add - "you got some sandin' to do son' hehe.  get some heavy grit and get to work.  factory sealer is hard to get through and takes a lot of work.  

in my humble o... walnut really looks great when it gets a hair darker from finish.  lot of things will do that - tru oil, tung oil, danish oil.  all good options imo and can be fairly easy if not going gloss.

really inspiring seeing you work thru this one.  not inspiring enough to make me think I'll try it any time soon (hehe) but inspiring none the less!  you rawk.

5 hours ago, Prostheta said:

I took the neck back to the CNC today and performed repeated facing operations on the headstock until it came closer to 21mm in thickness. This pushed the transition between the fingerboard and headstock faces back, and also the outline of the headstock. Juggling jobs meant that I didn't give prior though to the placement of the glued headstock wing tip, so I had to re-saw that off and re-glue in the correct position. Oops. Still, no harm done.

cnc is really the bass-o-matic of the the tool world.  so many tools it can do the job of!  afa wing tip... if a luthier makes a mistake and no one sees it... is it still a mistake?  also, mmmmmm steak.