curtisa

Traditional Fender P or J only has shielding on back of scratchplate, if any at all. Unless you play your basses in a particularly hostile electrical environment I would get too hung up on shielding the pickup cavities too much. If you're using a scratchplate do what Leo did. If no scratchplate, a bit of shielding paint or shielding tape wherever it's possbible to squeeze it in without being seen will be more than enough. What's probably more important is that you use good quality components and put it all together cleanly.

All of Floyd Rose's nuts are 10" radius (there is a typo in the Floyd Rose nut chart that erroneously lists the R3 as having a 12" radius). The only exception appears to be the R10 nut (15"). Curiously the Schaller equivalent R10 is listed on their site as 10" radius on their "drawings" page and 12" on their "guidelines" page I'm not aware of anyone offering a compound radius service on a blank fretboard. Warmoth offer compound radius but it appears to be for whole neck purchases. Maybe ask our local CNC guru, HuntinDoug? Stewmac offer a 10" - 14.5" compound radius pre-slotted 25.5" scale length board which may be an OK compromise? That said, if it were my first build I'd probably lower the bar a little and go for a constant radius board. You're already diving into the deep end by installing a Floyd. If you're like the rest of us and develop a horrible addiction to this guitar-building malarkey, you'll most likely want to build many further guitars after your first. Makes sense to gradually increase the level of difficulty as you get more builds completed. 10" or 12" pre-radiused boards can be bought from all sorts of places - LMII, Stewmac, Ebay.... I'd suggest going with one of those, plus the FR nut of your choice. Unless you can find a locking nut that is explicitly for a larger radius, don't match nuts with more than radius 2" discrepancy against the fretboard (eg, avoid 10" radius nuts if building a 16" fretboard) - it creates a massive intonation/feel problem at the nut end of the neck which cannot be tuned out.

Probably largely a question of personal preference. I prefer wider necks, so if it were me I'd be aiming for the R5 nut (1 3/4" wide). Bear in mind that the thickness and profile of the neck at the nut will also impact the feel, possibly moreso than an extra 2mm of width and an extra 0.3mm string-to-string spacing. If sourcing a Floyd Rose kit with the included R5 nut is proving difficult, or you have to shell out for an R3 kit plus an extra R5 nut, that may force your hand into going with the marginally narrower nut. Don't forget also that the difference at the nut-end of the neck between the R3 and R5 are practically non-existent the further up the neck you play, as the bridges do not come with the variety of string spacing that the nuts do. If you have the opportunity try some other guitars and decide if you prefer one with a 1 3/4" wide nut.

Depending on your which type of installation you're going to perform with the locking trem you may need a shorter sustain block. Last Floyd I installed on a 42mm body was for a fully-floating bridge (ie, can raise or lower the Floyd) with the base plate adjusted flush to the face of the guitar. With the 37mm sustain block I had on mine there wasn't enough clearance at the back of the body to allow the sustain block to swing backwards when raising the trem arm without it bottoming out on the trem cavity cover. You can either get a 32mm sustain block, or do what I did and cut off 5mm from the 37mm block with a hacksaw, file the cut smooth and redrill the spring securing holes an extra 5mm deeper. If you're going for a dive-only installation of the trem you should be fine with the 37mm block.

Electrical tape is non-conductive, so it's safe to wrap around various components. It's possible the switch hasn't survived being glued back together and was damaged internally by whatever impact broke the mounting points.

Roller bearing version is the shizzle. A little fiddly to set up, but once it's ready to go it's far smoother to use than a regular square-faced mitre box. That lamination...uh, de-lamination is amazingly clean - you sure you put glue in there to start with? I reckon your trademark headstock shape will marry perfectly with the pointy SS style.

Mddle lug of volume pot looks right to me. What's the white wire that's coming off there in those pics? Edit: duh, should take more notice of your original posting - white wire middle lug -> output jack. No sound from any pickup (check operation of selector switch)? Not even faint hum/hiss/buzz with the volume pot wound all the way up (check operation of volume pot)? Known good amp and lead? Try taking a regular guitar lead and plug it into an amp, attach a wire from the the shield of the lead to the back of the volume pot and use the tip of the lead to poke around the lugs on the selector switch. Assuming the switch and pickups are OK, the pickups should work as you make contact to each of the white wires on the selector switch. Was the guitar working to begin with? What work was being done to it? If the guitar was fine before, can you backtrack your work until it starts working again? Wiring looks OK from pics, but always hard to tell at this distance. Does the white wire coming off the innermost lug of the selector switch go to the outer lug of the volume pot before jumping over to the middle lug of the tone pot?

Try a dry fit of the neck/shims and body first to see how much angle you need before committing to it. Any gap at the base of the neck may be hidden by the neck pickup surround. Any gap underneath the neck may be unnoticable where it disappears into the pocket (looks like the Gibson RD has quite a deep pocket). If you're happy with how it looks you can probably get away with leaving it as-is. If you decide to re-route the pocket or re-shape the rear face of the heel after you've finished the guitar you'll need to be super-careful with your work, as your chances of damaging the finish while you're using the tools will increase. Easier to make cuts and adjustments before finishing. String trees - lots of styles to choose out there for a few bucks each, cheaper on Ebay. Can you post a pic of the headstock, or link to the original purchase page?

At the end of the day that's an aesthetic choice that is entirely up to you. Have a look at some of the pics I linked to in my earlier post and see if a recessed tailpiece is your cup of tea or not. Although the tools and skills required may be a bit off-putting if this is your first build? Then it is still possible to create your required neck angle. You either need to re-route the neck pocket so that the floor angles downward to allow the neck to tilt backwards once bolted in, or taper the flat surface on the back of the neck where it rests against the floor of the neck pocket to tip the neck backwards once bolted in. Again, the tooling required to execute it properly may be taking things further than you had hoped for a first build. So this is a Strat-style neck where the peghead is on the same plane as the fretboard, but stepped back about 1/2" or so? Then I'd be taking my cues from what Fender does with their headstocks, adding a string tree to the high E and B and possibly the G and D pair too. If it was good enough for Leo... Without the string trees you may find that the highest strings have a tendency to jump out of the nut slot as there isn't enough downwards force on the string behind the nut to keep it in place. Another side effect of not having enough downward pressure on the string behind the nut (low break angle plus long length of string between nut and tuner post) is the sympathetic ringing of the strings behind the nut as you play, which you may find annoying. If skills and tools are looking like your biggest hurdles to making it work with what you have then I'd suggest going the shim route - cheap, adjustable, requires no special tools and is reversible. The only real drawback is that you may have a slight gap at the back of the pocket, but if it was down to throwing the neck or body away and buying one with the correct angle built in to it, I know which solution I'd be trying first.

What kind of neck is it? The angle of the neck at the body shouldn't impact the angle of the strings behind the nut, they should be two different and unrelated issues.

I take it the neck is already fitted to the body, meaning you can no longer introduce a neck angle. As Tim37 suggests you could recess the Tune-o-matic to claw back some of the high action. Plugging the Tune-o-matic holes is an idea and then fitting a lower-profile bridge, but you'd have to decide how important it was for the look of the instrument to hide the plugs. If you were going to paint the body a solid colour the evidence would be hidden very easily. If you were going to go for a natural timber look and were happy to not add any of the comfort carving on the upper bout you could fit a sheet of veneer over the entire face of the body to cover the plugs. Another option could be to inlay a patch of contrasting timber over the area affected by the plugs and make it a feature.

The wonders of using adjectives to describe sound. One man's "airy and detailed" is another's "harsh and icy"... C'mon, we guitarists are some of the worst (best?) users of adjectives to describe the aural characteristics of our electric banjos. Second perhaps to audiophiles who look down their noses at anyone not willing to spend $10K on a power lead for their $300K Hifi system. "Aggressive", "bright", "warm", "lively", "alive", "snappy", "dull", "dark", "3D", "deep", "metallic", "spanky", "twangy", "brittle"... "Woody" at a guess could mean a sound with an emphasis in the upper-bass or low-mids, with a relatively rapid decay after the note is played. As I understand it...IMHO...For me anyways...etc...

Oooo, very angular of you, Scott. That first shot of the body outline I was reminded of the Ibanez 540P with its upsidey-downess. And then I realised that you were upside-downing the upsidey-downess once you had it cut out

Absolutely. Since the last one I've become a convert to fan frets. A six-stringer is the plan for the next one.

Things have been a bit quiet around here recently, but it's good to see some activity again. I must get back on the bandwagon myself. I have all the parts for the next build, but have been focusing on different projects recently.

I'm also keen to see what other features you're going to give this one in line with the "Super" in "Super Strat". Active pickups? Floating trem? Dayglo neon paintwork? Spandex?

Nice one, Scott. Always enjoy watching your builds unfold

Very nearly. The volume pot determines how much of the pickup's signal gets passed straight through to the output jack vs how much gets "lost" to ground. With vol on 10 the proportion of signal leaving the pot is much greater than that going to ground, and the result is that you hear the full output of the pickup. As the pot gets wound down towards zero, the ratio of pickup signal (ie, the sound of rock 'n roll) to ground (ie, the sound of silence) gets smaller, until eventually the pot is wound all the way to zero and 100% of the pickup's output is lost.

Anything that runs off desk 48V phantom power needs to be super-lean when it comes to power consumption. Absolute max you can get out of phantom power is 7mA, which is with the XLR output leads running into a dead short, by which time you have no voltage left at your destination to run anything that needs headroom. A couple of EMGs would be fine. A string of LEDs would be difficult to see in anything more than a pitch black room.

Easiest way to do it would be to retrofit a stereo output jack to the guitar and use the extra connector for the LED supply. Your lead will need to be replaced with a stereo cable and you'd also need to build some kind of breakout box at the other end to send the power to the guitar without sending it back to the amp. Alembic did it years ago with their Series 1 and 2 basses. Try googling there for starters.

Sounds like the neck and bridge pickups need to operate like a Fender Jazz Bass (minus the tone pot). Try this for starters. Leave out the tone pot and cap, and wire direct to the output jack from the middle volume pot as if the tone pot was deleted from the image. Wire labelled "Ground wire from bridge" will still need to be connected to one of the two volume pot cases. Pickup wires shown on the diagram will probably not match yours, so you will need to transpose them accordingly to suit your pickups. Middle pickup should just be a simple vol+tone arrangement with its own dedicated jack.

Switchable active/passive EQ is the sort of thing that is popular with bass players. Maybe there is a preamp out there in the bass world that already fits the bill?

The switch will have to be replaced, as the functions you are after from it exceeds the number of switchable elements. Artcore uses a Gibson-style toggle switch (I think?). I don't think you can achieve the three functions for the neck pickup plus adding the bridge with an off-the-shelf product that will drop in the place of the existing three position switch. If you don't want to add any more controls (what about push/pull pots?) the only thing I can think of is replacing the lever switch with a rotary switch, which you may not find visually or practically desirable. The other problem will be trying to get inside the guitar to do these mods. Are there access points on the Artcore big enough to get your hands into?

If all you want to do is wire up the pickups in Strat formation and make it work there a dozens of websites that will show you diagrams of what to connect where. Understanding what makes each component tick is more involved but not insurmountable if you're happy to sit down and study some literature. Stewmac has some basic primers and wiring diagrams to look at, as does Seymour Duncan. Extra wire is handy to have - single core and single core/shielded. Tone voodoo-ists will probably stipulate a minimum gauge and type. I prefer "whatever is small enough to fit where I need it", "nothing too small that I can't get my fat fingers to work with it" and "nothing that feels like it will snap if I bend it more than a couple of times". 20 - 18 gauge stranded conductor is probably fine, or 0.5mm - 0.8 sq mm for us metric folk. I've managed to amass a reasonable stockpile of wire from ratting an old retirement-home style organ. Suitable wire can be had for free if you know where to look. Shielding (if fitted) will need to be earthed to be effective. Ensure any adjacent pieces of copper foil tape overlap each other to maintain a continuous barrier around the circuitry you are trying to protect. Small holes in the shielding will likely have minimal impact. Whole pieces of copper tape that are islanded from each other will not be much use. A single wire run from the copper tape to a ground point in the guitar is then all that is required to make it work.

Kill switches normally operate by shorting the signal to ground, which gives the quietest operation. Swedish Luthier's suggestion will work but gives you two "normal" positions (both switches up/both switches down) and two "killed" positions (each switch in opposite positions), which may be a little confusing in practice and open to misfires on stage when performance is important. The OP can perhaps clarify a little, but it sounds to me like he requires one switch to be used exclusively to kill the signal and the second switch is only used to disengage (un-kill?) the kill switch. You want a mechanically interlocked switch assembly - can sometimes be seen on oscillating desk fans where depressing one switch makes the others pop up (OFF/SLOW/FAST). If this is indeed the required operation the OP is after it may be difficult to achieve using off-the-shelf products. A normal push on-off switch generally cannot be modified to mechanically interlock with an adjacent switch. Companies like C&K and Schadow do make mechanically interlocked pushbutton assemblies, but they will be hard to find. Electronic switching is an option but will be fiddly to execute and may be beyond the scope of the modding of the OPs guitar.