Prostheta

Shellac tends to have a lifetime of about six months, maybe a little more. It's always worth testing to check. It shouldn't be necessary anyway, as Aluminium self-passivates by developing a hard oxide layer pretty much as soon as you expose fresh material. That's is what I would call a high standard for electronics! We rarely see things built this way, purely because it doesn't translate to manufacturing as easily as shielding paint or similar. It's no different to a guitar pedal case shielding the electronics, and it'll work wonderfully.

I think the main issue with wiring point-to-point grounding is that the signals within guitar electronics are of a high enough impedance that any resistance and stray capacitance within the grounding plan can cause potential differences rather than a consistent hard ground like what you'll have here. Grounding is often discussed in unclear terms, with a lot of monkey-see monkey-do reinforcing poor methods. I prefer to treat the inside of a guitar cavity like the outside, sanding and cleaning fully. Copper foil burnished over a smooth surface with solder tacks here and there pretty much do what you've done here. Yours is absolutely over and above the call of duty though!

I'm certain we're not breaking any sort of new ground here, and there will be many people who have already spent lifetimes on this very same subject....which being thankful to them means we haven't done (or need to do) so yet  

The constraint or unknown in this mill of factors is always going to be the wood; you can determine ideal values for certain characteristics but you only have the choice of woods (or alternative materials, composites, modified materials, etc.) that are real. It may well be that one factor within all of this undermines the potential usage of a range or all others. The one that springs to mind might be dissimilar materials have differing movement ratios in response to humidity.

If or when I ever build an acoustic, I have 100% certainty that I will be relying on an existing body of experience to guide my arm to lay the first arrow into the target. I doubt that I could go my own route without first having a feel for the "established norm"!

This all being said, "Mahoganies" tend to be on the softer end of the scale than most hardwoods anyway. At least, true Mahoganies within the genus Swietenia. Alternative "African Mahoganies" (all still within the higher family Meliaceae) have more variability in terms of weight and elasticity. Sapele is the heavyweight of the lot, and I do like the airy lightness of Khaya Ivorensis/Senegalensis. I digress into wood nerdoidness....

The weight of tradition and end-user expectation makes the introduction of something different a lot harder. Taylor had an uphill battle, but at least they had the reputation to back them up. The evolution of instruments can stagnate, sometimes for reasons of perfecting certain points and sometimes just stalling. Testing and picking apart the history to identify whether something is "because that's how it should be" or validating a reasoning is a vital exercise. Evolve or die!

8 hours ago, ADFinlayson said:

....I was impressed with the amount of bass, I was surprised because all the research said mahogany braces are a no no. The top is quite thin so is the back so I've only got 10 gauge strings on it which will probably be affecting tone....

My understanding is that this is a no-no also, but without knowing a specific rationale ("it's always been done this way!") it's absolutely something that should be subject to experimentation. Being not entirely sure as to why Spruce is the go-to, my first principles guessing would be any material's favourable properties for specific behaviours; stiffness-to-weight ratio, Young's modulus, whether sound propagates through a top made as a composite of dissimilar soft and hard woods differently, whether there's a difference in how the strings set the top into motion, whether a wood that produces bracing of a larger cross-sectional area is more amenable to finer tuning and shaving, etc. Not my area really, but a problem that is surely a rabbit hole. For me this moves very swiftly into the realms of speculation and hence the first level of Dante's rabbit hole.

We do have the benefit as individual builders of not having to factor excessive safety margins into builds as with more manufacturing-based building. We can tune every top individually and shave bracing to taste on a relaxed schedule rather than have a one size fits all brace sizing/shaping conveyor. It may simply be that Spruce is easy and forgiving, and other woods less so, yet suitable "in the zone". I'd like to think that this is the case.

edit: another property I was thinking about was the difference in seasonal expansion/contraction between differing materials.

To me, acoustics have always been the prime example of how the right jig can massively improve all those very specific processes, whether it's bridge placement/drilling or the neck joint. Electrics are simple by comparison. Definitely a good rabbit hole.

That's pretty much what I figure as well. I prefer instruments that are to the point rather than endlessly-comprehensive, so I might even keep Pearly a 3-way switched same as the EMG-based Invaders. I've never been a fan of pull pots as I prefer switching from one voice to another using a single control. I'd rather upgrade to a 5-way switch by that point.

So a little one how I'd go about designing a 5-way switch to cater for multiple voices and single coil switching. The Fluence has a very simple method of switching voice or engaging single coil mode, which is either done with hard jumpering to set a pickup in one voice/mode at installation, or pulling a specific pin to ground with some switching.

This says to me that the switch needs to be 2-pole; one pole is for pulling the appropriate voice/mode pins to ground based on switch position, and the other to provide specific pickups' output to the rest of the circuit downstream of that, eg. volume/tone. My own configuration will vary somewhat from this as I run a tone pot for the neck pickup only and a master volume. This brings in the tone pot to a weird position direct to the switch, but we'll look at that later. The second pole of the switch selects between the various pickups that are live at any one position. Tie the neck to position 1 (most forward) and the bridge to position 5 (most rearward). Wire jumpers between these tags and the intermediate positions provide various combos.

My proposed design of Voice 1 on the outer positions, Voice 2 adjacent and single coil Mode in the middle just requires that ways 2+4 pull the Voice pin to ground and way 3 pulls the neck pickup's single coil to ground. Similarly, any other control over the pickup's other functions like the low-pass tilt filter and volume reduction can be bonded to these ways as appropriate. Neck humbucker voices too loud compared to the other positions? Bond those two positions ground ways to the -6dB control pin. Single coil too brash? Try it with frequency tilt in that position.

Having voiced this "on paper", I figure that I might even keep this whole thing simpler. The VLX54 3-way I have on hand for Pearly easily presents good options. I don't use a middle position of both pickups on in a dual humbucker guitar, so that middle position could easily be assigned to set the bridge pickup to Voice 2 (if Iike both voices) or to the neck single coil Mode (unless I like the neck Voice 2). Those feel like a good working palette over a more complex system, and derives all the benefits I require.

I'm not going into this at any level beyond how I switch between voices and pickups. I might use a neck single as one of the options.

The design is relatively vertical in terms of it not being that modifiable. Each pickups seems baked into the three modes with accessory options like the frequency tilt and volume reduction. In principle you are correct, however I'm not sure if the design would allow that even if the internals were accessible. I noticed a few plated through holes on the bottom, however it would be unlikely that tapping into any of these would be easy or productive. Not as ripe as you might think by unit, however the platform itself might lend itself to some pretty odd options and possibilities. Or completely not.

It'll be a very different neck tone for me as well since I normally play 22 frets rather than 24. I'm interested to see how the Fluence neck pickup works with the tone dialled all the way back. I have some work to do to figure out exactly how I want the blade switch to operate, but likely I will need to become familiar with the tones on tap from the two voices. I imagine something like PAF (voice 1) either end of the blade (1+5), voice 2 (hot rod, chime) either side of those (2+4) and maybe something else in the middle such as both pickups in voice 1 (PAF).

I'm leaning that way myself. Covers help strings not get caught under the bobbin edges with trem use, plus the (steel?) poles in the Open Core Classics aren't ideal.

Last post, February?! Wow, I really have let things slide. So sorry everybody....employment is being a PITA (more accurately the lack of it) so my focus has been elsewhere. I'm scraping together the expensive bit for any guitar - hardware - and getting paint done when I can find some good time to do it.

Quick question that I'd like some input on. The white Mirage is going to get Fluence Classics, however I've torn between the open core or the covered (gold).

Old render (hence silver fretwork) with an approximation of Fluence Open Core pickups (but not with gold poles):

Up-to-date render with covered Fluence Classics:

More often than not, the money doesn't exist within the margins to justify that work.

I personally decided that fret rockers don't mean very much to the built instrument since the neck is always going to be in some state of tension or relaxation. As part of the initial fretting process, they can tell you some things to dial out or problem areas to bear in mind prior to full fret levelling. I use mine as a tool for "hearing" loosely seated frets now.

Dialling out fret buzz using up-bow from string tension is a mixed bag. I would suspect that there's some issue with the fret levelling rather than a lack of action. A truss rod should ideally only prevent excessive up-bow from string tension rather than having to induce it. The ideal neck geometry under string tension for most is a slight amount of up-bow to provide room for vibrating string deflection.

If the instrument is under some sort of warranty, I would chase that or get the seller to do better initial setup work. The sort of work I would do to a guitar in this situation would negate that initial warranty; firstly I'd relax the truss rod and remove the strings and preferably the nut. Once the neck is straight and relaxed (overnight is more than enough, usually) tape the fingerboard up leaving the frets exposed, marking the fret tops with a Sharpie and lightly hitting the tops with a straight file will show any high or low spots. I'd guess that you're going to have weirdness in the first position.

Too many guitars leave factories with poorly levelled fretwork, and hiking up the action excessively to hide those faults isn't something that you should accept. If the action higher up becomes silly to make it playable down low, the problem is in the fretwork. Sometimes it doesn't seem obvious what the fault is, and the fix often causes another issue. Take it back to fundamentals and work the problem upwards. Like I say....if it's under warranty then use it. 

Woohoo!

No worries man, great to see the work went as planned. Bummer about the pickup ring, but those polyester finishes chip like hell unless you tape it up, take fractions of a mm at a time till you're through, and even then it still chips when you don't want it to.

13 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

I just bought some 5 m3 of alder and aspen but they aren't sawn and dried. She loves it! But I guess the price I paid was much lower than that of Novowood's...

Matchsticks and sauna benches! Of course she'll love it. Aspen and black Alder grow on trees in these parts though, so it's easy to hunt good deals.

If you have to wonder, you have to find out.

No worries! The link to Novowood was for @Bizman62 even though even I am closer to Novowood/Lahti than he is....looks like a nice drive down highway 6 with his left arm out of the window giving Russia the middle finger for a couple of hours, then more or less the same distance as it takes me from here.

https://www.novowood.fi/SAARNI/ekauppa/g201025/?search_group=201025&pageno=0.975

Novowood do actually stock 80mm European Ash, but you'd get a pretty asymmetrical result from bookmatching.

Single-piece bodies are highly dependent on the wood type yielding stable wood over a large width, which is a far less common thing these days. Ash is easily available in wide slabs, but I wouldn't trust it to produce a stable flat workpiece over any sort of width unless it was super wide ring radius from the outside of the tree for flat ring orientation, or a piece that contained the pith dead centre that could be cut out and rejoined for vertical ring orientation.

Bookmatching requires a heavier gauge of stock, at least twice that of the desired workpiece. Bookmatching the back of most instruments would need stock at least four inches thick, which is not a nice job to try and dry reliably. That's without mentioning the higher demands on yield/waste, and that most sawmills won't cut to that sort of gauge without you buying wood by the metric shit tonne (as opposed to an Imperial shit ton). Most wood on the open market is available a couple of inches or 52mm in gauge. Have a look over Novowood's (in Lahti) inventory as that's where I buy most of my Sapele for furniture and architectural.

Flitch matching is more than adequate for a non-figured piece of wood where you're not trying to achieve symmetry by specific figuring patterns. Done well, you'd have difficulty telling a bookmatched versus a flitch matched back.

Like I said....I've never worked with stacked buckers, but clearly they work....for some reason we've yet to divine  

Crazy how far from the Tele mould this is, yet still absolutely parallel to it. Very cool.

Yeah, without scanning back through the build I think I recall something about that. I might be wrong or thinking of something else

Never tried a stacked humbucker myself, but I can imagine how things can get out of hand pretty quickly in anything that isn't Les Paul sorts of territory.

That and it reminds me of a Mosrite-ish headstock as well! Teles and Strats don't have that sort of "drop", at least visually speaking anyway. I like its consistency tying in with the pickup ring and f-holes.

I'm not that good at hearing things objectively, so I always end up looking for things that I could key onto and that was one of them. My ears aren't that good, so I guess my imagination for how something might translate makes up for that  

Good point about the shelf just beyond the nut. The headstock reminds me very much of the snakehead paddle style, which is very cool of itself I think. The drop from the fingerboard to the tuners looks pretty deep; am I right in thinking that it's more than a Fender sort of half-inch drop?

Sounds like you have a good mind for building on each experience. Onward!

That's just a fantastic demo. Really excellent opening playing choice to showcase this one. That mid boost is very nice to have onboard as well; it seems to retain the right level of sparkle on top of the added warm mid presence. Overall though, there's a deceptively-large palette of usable tonal options on tap. I could imagine uses for pretty much all of these, avoiding that one-trick pony issue that too many guitars fall into. Man, that parallel stacked tone around 16:27.

Just great work, man. I love it. So what did you take from this build that you might apply going on towards the next?