curtisa

Apologies for the spaghetti wiring. I think this is what you're after: Pickup selection options are: Middle+Neck+Boost Middle Middle Middle + Neck Neck Notes: Need to purchase an Oak Grigsby 5-way 4-pole Superswitch to replace the stock Squire one, plus replace the stock output jack with a stereo tip-ring-sleeve (TRS) version. The battery will be disconnected whenever the lead is unplugged to prevent battery drain when not in use. You didn't mention whether you wanted to drill another hole for the treble boost pot, so I've assumed you would have been happy to lose one of the tone controls instead and install the treble boost pot in its place. To that end I've made the remaining tone control a master tone for both pickups. Volume and tone controls are on the output side of the treble boost (again, not sure if this is what you were expecting?) Take care around all the little jumpers on the switch - there are quite a few! The Treble Boost is wired with true bypass when not engaged (switch positions 2-5). Not sure if that's important to you? I have no idea if the wire colours will match your pickups, but you get the idea

I reckon you're going to need to replace the switch with something like a 5-way 4-pole Oak Grigsby Superswitch. Is the duplicated 'middle' position something that you are happy to work with or would you prefer to eliminate it? You could always replace the 5-way switch with a standard 3-way Telecaster-style one and do your treble boost using a push-pull pot or mini toggle switch. Do you have a circuit in mind for the treble boost component?

It might help if you can indicate what each of the switch positions are you want to achieve. A stock 5-way switch on a Strat implies that it originally had the typical Bridge/Bridge+Mid/Mid/Mid+Neck/Neck options, but with the bridge pickup missing that makes for one position that does nothing (Bridge) and one position that becomes a duplicate of another (Middle only).

The other key feature of the dedicated blender pot is that it can fully fade out each pickup at the extremes of the pot's rotation. The version in the video will never allow you to fully achieve an un-blended pickup selection; there will always be some degree of the neck pickup signal passing through with the bridge (and vice versa) when the blend is turned down to a minimum. Whether that matters to you or not is more down to taste. You could always do something heretical and go out an buy one of those crappy old organs. They're usually super cheap , or even completely free, because no-one really wants them anymore. I picked up one to have fun with about 15 years ago from the local waste recovery centre for about the price of a six pack of beer and ended up gutting it, extracting all sorts of goodies in the process - switches, shielded wire, pots, capacitors, obscure ICs...

They should be available at most electronics component retailers. Try searching for 'latching pushbutton' or 'alternate action pushbutton'.

I'd go for option B. If you're using a CNC you don't trust to make a small run of identical guitars, the last thing you want to do is blow one of your body blanks if the CNC decides to have a brainfart. MDF templates are cheap and easy, and it won't be a total disaster if the CNC makes a mess of one.

Gretsch Streamliner product page says the three controls by the F-hole should be one master tone and an independent volume for each of the pickups, and a master volume near one of the cutaways. Indeed, the product manual is written very generically, covering multiple different models, so perhaps the 3+1 control arrangement is just their 'thing'? Sounds to me like a faulty tone control. I'd certainly be focusing any attention on that area first.

Zzzzzz....huh? Did someone say something...? That Guitar Max pickup thingy seems to be using a recycled LCD screen from an old mobile phone. You can see the 'shadows' along the top of of the screen where the unused phone reception bargraph, battery bargraph and flightmode segments are. Those screens are usually developed with power conservation in mind (the Nokia 5110 screen popular with home tinkerers draws less than 0.5mA with the backlight off) but normally at 3.3V battery voltages, so for simplicity you'd probably use some kind of lithium cell rather than the ubiquitous 9V battery and a stepdwon regulator. There's probably no reason you couldn't make something like that last for months on a single charge. Because it spends most of its time doing nothing you'd just put any onboard CPU to sleep to conserve as much power as possible, and only wake it up when you are either programming it or flicking the pickup selector. But, y'know....fiddling with buttons, inconvenience, option overload, another battery to look after...I can see that it might have limited appeal to the guitarist masses. I reckon it's safe to say it's a dead product. The blog page where it was announced on the guitarelectronics.com website is dated November 2007.

It's a known issue with nearly all browsers. The problem is that the original Fretfind2D was written using Flash, which is now deprecated and is blocked from running in most browsers by default. If you can find and install a Flash plugin and force it to run you might be able to get it to work. Alternatively you can run a non-Flash version of Fretfind2D located here, or use @Polymaker's excellent offline SiGen software (Windows only) which I think is arguably better than Fretfind2D.

Looks about right to my eyes

@ADFinlayson is correct - if you're approaching these builds on a semi-kit basis using templates there's actually not many reasons to amass a whole bunch of jigs to put them together. The templates themselves (assuming they're well made) will largely steer you in the right direction without resorting to all manner of customised jigs and assistants for one-off functions. The tools you have access to and how you use them will matter more.

Welcome aboard Before piling up recommendations as to what jigs you could need, it might help if you provide a bit more detail as to what tools you have at your disposal and how (in a broad sense) you're planning on building. For example: If you're going to purchase a prefabricated template set there's no reason to suggest building some kind of neck pocket jig or pickup routing templates, although the assumption will be that you will have access to a router with template-following bits. If you're going to buy your fretwire pre-radiused there's no reason to make up some kind of fret bending jig, although the assumption will be that you'll have access to equipment that will allow you to install and dress the frets (hammer, cutters, files, straightedge etc). If you're planning on using pre-slotted/radius'ed fretboards you probably don't have a need for a fret slotting jig or radius sanding blocks. Drill press? Bandsaw? Jigsaw? Plane? Thicknesser? Clamps? Consumables (sandpaper, glue, sticky tape)? Drills? Chisels? Etc etc... The list of potential jigs used in guitar making can get quite long, and will vary depending on how much you want to do yourself, how much you're willing to 'farm out' to others and what equipment and skills you have access to.

The better solution would be to fuse the output of the power supply. Placing the fuse between battery and power supply protects the battery. Placing the fuse after the power supply protects the power supply and by extension, you too. Fusing the PSU output doesn't help with the second hypothetical failure I mentioned above though (disconnected string ground or other ungrounded part of the guitar coming in to contact with the HT). Such a failure wouldn't blow the fuse, no matter how sensitive it is. Your only recourse in that situation is to mechanically design the circuit such that the potential for such a failure is minimised in the first place. Look in to things like using heavy duty terminals that positively grip the wires rather than solder connections direct to circuit boards, providing strain relief on any wire leaving the amp or power supply, or using shrouded/insulated terminations on wires that may be unplugged. I'd be tempted to mount the whole thing inside some kind of non-conductive box within the guitar and consider the contents inside it the 'danger zone'. Put all the nasty bits inside this box, and design it such that anything inside it can be allowed to fail without coming into contact with anything on the other side of the walls of the box. Anything leaving this danger zone to the outside world (eg pickup leads, speaker wires, 12V battery supply etc) can then receive the focus of your attention on how best to make as mechanically robust as possible.

Feedback that was less than you expected is always a bit of a challenge to accept, but the best you can do in this case is make good where you can and use that information to raise the bar on your next build. If you put enough of your work out in the open you'll invariably have to come up against it. Your honesty, willingness to listen to it and act upon it will go a long way to making sure your work remains of a high calibre. Regarding the comments about the control layout, maybe all that was required was a printed 'cheat sheet' bundled with the guitar. As the builder what might seem obvious to us may not be apparent to the customer, especially with unfamiliar terms such as 'parallel cross pattern' or 'series stacks'. If it looked like a Tele, smelt like a Tele and felt like a Tele, he might've been expecting the controls to operate like a Tele as well. Unless you need extra height at the nut for slide playing there is absolutely no reason to make the nut higher. Raising the nut height introduces intonation errors in the lower frets that cannot be compensated out at the saddles. In theory the nut height relative to the first fret shouldn't be any higher than the second fret height relative to the third (and 3rd vs 4th, and 4th vs 5th, and so on and so on...). In practice it can afford to be a little higher due to the way the neck curves and the strings vibrate in the open position, but not excessively. Also a good reason to look in to zero frets

The material itself won't make it any more suitable for thinner bodied guitars. Floyd Rose make tremolo blocks down to 28mm in metal as well. Whatever tone magic stone might have over steel or brass I'll leave to you to decide The bigger influence will be the length of the block. The shorter the block the shorter the lever that is available to counter the pull of the strings. This means that the springs need to be stronger (either more of them, stretched further or made from stiffer material) to equalise the tension of the strings, which conversely makes the tremolo feel stiffer when using the arm, particularly when divebombing.

That makes me feel old. StrongBad was the first internet animated series I wasted too much time watching while exploiting the heady speeds attainable on the broadband work internet connection

Mach probably mention not networking your milling PC because historically if you had such a setup in a mission critical shop environment there'd be no way any sane machinist would use that PC for anything other than milling. The CNC computer would be used for one task and one task only. FWIW LinuxCNC carries similar recommendations regarding networking and shared usage. Personally I just live with the hassle of transferring files using USB sticks when required. Fusion360 isn't supported on Linux anyway, so invariably I'm double-handling everything when transitioning between designing and milling.

Design safety (ie the schematic) is only a small component to making the build safe. Arguably the larger contributor will be how you make it. I don't think it's an impossible task, but it will be tricky. 200V @ 100mA at the very least will hurt. Battery-powered portable high voltage tube stuff did exist in the past (radios, TVs, test equipment etc). Maybe look into some of the construction techniques used in them for ideas as to what made them safe (ish) to use. Plate-to-grid short on the first tube stage could put a hundred volts or so on the pickups. The string ground connection could come loose and touch something carrying HT volts. Admittedly rare failures, but this is also a rare build. Also consider that while this circuit is ungrounded and floating, it's not this that inherently makes it difficult to make safe. You could have a failure that puts the HT supply on some metallic part of the guitar you're in contact with, but because you're also ungrounded it doesn't become apparent until you reach over and touch something that is grounded and get a zap that way.

Yep, that'll do it

Looks better. Still think you're missing a trick not taking advantage of an asymmetric headstock, but can fully appreciate that's not your design goal in this case. Errmmmm...You apparently have 14 frets to the octave...

Looks like a Hipshot Tremsetter stabiliser to me.

If you push the perpendicular fret back towards the nut, thereby straightening the bridge you can probably get away with conventional pickups mounted...well, conventionally. There'd be no real advantage in investing in angled pickups (or angling regular pickups) if the bridge was nearly back to where it was on a regular 'un-fanned' LP. That leaves your options wide open to installing any pickup you like too. You do have your own CNC - you could mill your own baseplates I'd suggest that transplanting regular pickup bobbins onto an angled baseplate might need some planning, as the bobbins will have their polepieces spaced assuming the strings run perpendicular to them. If the angle gets too severe the outer pole pieces will start falling out of alignment with the strings. Effectively this is the same issue as rotating the ToM tailpiece around to match the required bridge fan angle; at some point the rotation starts influencing string spacing too much. I suspect this is why companies like Bareknuckle only offer their pickups in a limited number of fan angles - it saves them having to tool up their bobbins for multiple different pole spacings and lengths. For that reason you probably couldn't just transplant conventional pickup bobbins onto those cheap Chinese multiscale pickups either, as there's no guarantee the angled Chinese baseplates will accept straight bobbins at an angle. Pretty sure the Nighthawk pickup angles the wrong way for a multiscale build, unless you can find a left-handed version. I'm guessing that might be super-rare and if you don't like the sound of the Nighthawk pickup, super-limiting as to what the guitar could be capable of doing. What about reducing your fan by 1/4" to compensate? Because of the compounding nature of the fret spacings vs fret angle towards the top of the neck, you're probably not going to notice that angular difference near the pickups, plus it keeps the nut angle the same as it was before.

Ditching the grounds on each of the pickup on/off switches will fix that (they serve no real purpose). The only real foible is that when in 'series' mode the 4th pickup on/off switch will do nothing - the two series'd pickups will be controlled as a combined unit by the 2nd switch. You get individual pickup on/off functionality back when you go back to 'parallel' mode. The section for the two single coils is actually quite a nifty little circuit. Confusing and complex, but I think it will work.

Agreed. That's running with the idea and cranking up the volume with no real regard to how it looks as a whole. It does look kinda daft, but it does have a pretty severe fan on it which doesn't help either. Your proposal is much more subtle and sympathetic to the Les Paul heritage. Well...ignoring the 50s hotrod airbrush flames of course... Something a little more in keeping with the idea, but not afraid to acknowledge that there's a little bit of a deviation from the traditional. Like your seasick example this is still probably a little bit too extreme, but perhaps illustrates how it may be possible to marry the two themes without it resting too heavily in Les Paul-ness:

I realise it's just a mockup, but be aware that the ToM tailpiece will need to be tilted further around anticlockwise than what your rendering indicates. Don't forget that a ToM bridge on a conventional guitar has to be naturally tilted (I dunno, 8-10 degrees?) to allow enough intonation range on those teeny little saddle adjusters. Fretfind2D doesn't include any saddle intonation compensation in its layouts, so your eventual ToM bridge rotation will be the typical angle it usually has plus whatever Fretfind2D says the bridge should be twisted to given your multiscale parameters. What about angling the tail piece slightly to match? Or ditching it altogether and running string-thru body ferrules instead? Fair enough. If it were me I'd take advantage of the fact that the multiscale guitar now has an inherent angular-ness to it and puposely design the headstock to be slightly asymmetric to complement the look. But, y'know. I isn't you