curtisa

Back on the bad old days before I got into guitar making I was heavily into DIY tube amps and pro audio stuff. Great to see something like this popping up here for a change of pace, and to stoke fond memories of firing up something for the first time without letting the brown smoke out

Does it need to be grounded? I don't see any part of your switching arrangement that would necessarily require part of it grounded, unless you're doing something like coil-splitting the humbuckers. The only grounding you may want to add is for noise reduction, which would automatically occur when the switch is bolted to any shielding you may have inside the control cavity, but it's certainly not mandatory. The grounding in that case is done by the threaded shaft of the switch being in physical contact with the conductive shielding, which should already be grounded. Not sure I follow. All of your circuit requires grounds at various points otherwise parts of it won't work. Each pickup requires a ground, each volume pot requires a ground, each tone pot requires a ground etc

How is it not working? The diagram looks right, but there is a lot of detail missing (I assume you left out a lot of it to make it easier to read?) so if there's another wiring fault going on that isn't shown in your sketch it isn't obvious. For example the grounding for the pickups seems to be missing, as does any detail around how the volume pots and output jack are wired. Not ground. It should be the common output (hot) of the switch after selecting your combinations of pickups, which is how I assume you've drawn it, If this is the case it looks like it's drawn correctly, notwithstanding that it appears incomplete. 99% of the time grounds to various parts of the circuit should be continuous and unbroken. You can, and if the wiring is already installed in the guitar you can do it, but you need to be able to strum the strings and measure the output at the same time. It also doesn't tell you if the signal you're measuring is one pickup or all three, or if there's some other noise being superimposed on to the guitar output. In which case you may as well just plug the guitar into an amp and listen to the output. Continuity measurment provides a quick feedback that point A connects to point B without relying on the pickups being operational, which is handy when you have the guts of the guitar spilled all over your workbench while you're working on it.

While the strings are off (and on then off then on then off...) it's interesting to see how flat the radius on the fretboard actually is. This is a 16" radius caul from the fret press, and even in the middle there might still be a little bit of a gap, which suggests it's flatter still: Tuning machines can finally be attached permanently. I had them unscrewed for the majority of the setup so I could see what things were doing under string tension and still be able to quickly take the strings off again to tweak things. I've just applied a little paste wax to the shafts near the mounting plate, plus a little on the holes on the inner section of the slotted headstock. This helps lubricate things while not leaving behind any oily/greasy residue that might stain the wood. And apologies if the appearance of the paste makes it look like earwax: The original saddle is probably another thing that's ended up replaced at some point in this guitar's past, as it never fitted the slot in the bridge properly. It was too loose and would tip forward as the strings were tuned up, which not only looked silly but also ruined the intonation of the instrument. As chance would have it I already had a bone blank in my parts drawers with a 16" radius pre-cut into the top, plus it was the correct 1/8" thickness to fit in the slot nicely without wobbling. All I have to do is take some of the height away by sanding the bottom: With the saddle in place a final check of the action gives us about 2mm on the treble and 2.5mm on the bass: An attempt to add some fine tuning of the intonation on the saddle by pushing back the break point on the low-E, A and B strings. The unaltered intonation was actually not too far off, but the above three strings just needed a little extra compensation added: And finally plug the hole on the belly reducer mounting screw with some scrap rosewood. This will get trimmed down and cleaned up once the glue dries...and I'll have to take the strings off again :

In your second picture I think I can just make out the two copper strands of the pickup winding(s) wrapping around the outside of the base plate from the ends of the red and white wires. Without knowing what kind of pickup this is meant to be (stacked humbucker? mini humbucker? single coil? some unusual shielded thing?) it's impossible to say what each wire does just by looking. I guess you could use a multimeter and measure ohms for each possible combination of the three wires. You might find that you get two combinations where the resistance readings are equal and one where the resistance reading is double the other two? That might suggest that the pickup is some kind of humbucker. One wire may also be connected to that copper strip that appears to be underneath the base on the pickup in the background of the first picture, which could be grounded for shielding purposes? Dunno. Just speculating now... Are the other pickups already connected inside the guitar? Can you just copy what is already there? Probably the most reliable thing to do would be to ask Blade directly for assistance. There appears to be an email contact on their website.

I've always liked the Hipshot Hardtail bridges. Nice and chunky but no sharp edges to worry about. Their retrofit unit for the Ibanez Gibraltar bridge also has that beefy but comfy look.

Most likely the output jack or the wiring connected to it. Probably take a repair shop under an hour to fix, The parts are cheap enough, but the biggest hassle will be fishing out the old socket from inside the body of the guitar to get at the wiring and terminals.

It was more of an idea of what templates you might need to do it (I had assumed you were going to use a router). There's no requirement to make all those interlocking perspex plates; MDF would do the same job and would be easier to obtain and cheaper. But ideally you'd want as a minimum the back route for the springs, the through route for the tremolo block to poke through the body, and some kind of dish route for the baseplate of the bridge to sit in to to allow for up-pull on the bar. They're all rectangular shapes which makes them relatively easy to create. The closet OCD in me likes neat routes, hence the rather complicated method shown in the article, but there's no reason why a similar result couldn't be achieved with hand tools.

Getting to some of the smaller jobs now. As mentioned earlier, the bridge pins are probably not original on this guitar and have probably been replaced at some point in its past. These ones don't consistently sit into the holes up to their shoulders, with some sitting higher than others: For a one off job I'm not going to fork out over a hundred bucks for the bridge pin hole reamer with the correct taper from places like Stewmac or LMII, nor am I going to purchase a cheap reamer that won't match the taper of the pins, so I need to adapt an existing tool to do a similar job. It just so happens that the end of one of my rat tail files has a taper very close to the profile of the bridge pins. Here's a particularly crappy shot of the end of the file superimposed over the top of one of the bridge pins for comparison: By inserting the file into the bridge pin hole and turning it anti-clockwise (ie, against the sprial 'grain pattern' of the file teeth, as if unscrewing it) I can gently abrade the bridge pin holes to open them up to the correct taper and size a teeny bit at a time. I'm doing no more than two turns of the file in each pass and checking the fit of the pin as I go: Each pin takes a minute or two to do. I'm aiming for a firm press fit, but not so tight that it takes significant force to pull the pin back out once it bottoms out on the shoulder: After about 15 minutes all twelve pins are done:

Have a look at this article I wrote a number of years ago. It's regarding a recessed Floyd Rose routing template system, but the principles are similar to your requirements for a fully floating non-locking bridge. I would point out that it's fairly advanced work to create these kinds of templates from scratch; not particularly out of reach for a first time builder, but certainly requiring a good chunk of patience, care and attention. As @Bizman62 suggests, practice on scrap should be considered mandatory. Most people probably wouldn't go to the extra work of recessing a two-stud bridge to allow for up-pull. The more common solutions are to either loosen the trem springs to allow the bridge to tilt forward slightly, or to raise the studs so that the baseplate of the bridge remains parallel to the body top but with some clearance underneath.

Thanks Biz. On the one and only acoustic I ever made (from a kit, so no credibility points for me) the neck needed some back angle set into the neck block, and I did just what you describe to get around the deviating fret board issue. The fret board is pretty thin and flimsy and bends easily to flatten against the braced top in front of the soundhole and is unlikely to try and counter-deform the soundboard, especially when you've also got the strings trying to convince the neck fold back on itself as well. But it looks daft because its obvious that the fret board suddenly changes projection under the strings as the action increases dramatically above the neck/body join. You can probably get away with it if the amount of deviation you're trying to correct is small, but above about 1mm gap at the soundhole it stands out like crazy.

Danelectro pro has 17 frets to the end. A lot of other Dano's seem to have 19 frets. Would you leave the neck pocket the same as a typical Tele, continue the neck underneath the pickguard and just stop the fret board short at the 17th, or approach it another way?

Not quite, dammit: The glue hasn't separated. There's actually a slight deformation in the underside of the fret board near the soundhole, and the shim has simply deformed to match it when it was glued on. I'm willing to bet with my inexperience in removing the fret board extension I've slightly crushed the rosewood on that edge. It was this corner of the fret board I started working from when initially trying to get it to separate from the soundboard. I'm not going to remove the whole neck to fix this one little gap, so I'll use a mini shim to fill it instead. This time it is small enough to make it out of some rosewood: Gluing it is tricky because I can't move anything for easier access, so I just have to mask the area off and deal with any squeeze-out as it happens. I'm forced to working the glue in by using the edge of the shim to kinda mush it into the gap first: Much better. A little extra tinted varnish applied with the tiniest paintbrush I can find helps smooth the transition between the stained oak and rosewood too. Again, not perfect, but this guitar isn't either. At least the spruce soundboard remained free of any stain throughout this process:

A light sand is then done to make sure that any remaining oerhang on the shim is flush to the edges of the fret board, and some undiluted dark brown stain around the edges gets applied to help disguise the difference between the oak and rosewood. I've also applied a little flat varnish to seal the stained edges as well, primarily because when I glue this back on to the soundboard I want to avoid the possibility of the glue and stain mixing and seeping out on to the spruce top: I've also applied glue using masking tape to define a 'no-go' border around the edges to minimise any squeeze-out. The tape gets peeled off after aplying the glue leaving behind a well defined buffer zone prior to clamping. It's also a reasonably thin layer of glue which will help not only in reducing squeeze out, but also if I ever need to remove the neck again it won't take much heating to get it to loosen up: And then reattach the neck via the bolts inside the neck block and clamp the extension back in place. This should be the final time the neck is removed:

The side effect of resetting the neck angle is that the fret board extension over the body no longer sits at the same angle as the soundboard underneath it, so you end up with a tapering gap the closer you get to the soundhole. It's probable that my first-timedness in this process has slightly bent the fret board extension when I heated it off to begin with, which has possibly exacerbated the issue as well: I could just clamp it flat against the soundboard as-is and live with the look of the fret board and strings suddenly diverging at a greater rate at the point at which the neck and body meet, but I'd like to think I can do a little better than that. I've taken the decision to insert a tapered shim into the gap to hide the issue. The only problem I have with that idea is I don't have any rosewood scraps on hand to make a shim large enough. The width at the 20th fret on the Yammy is actually wider than the width at the 24th on my scrapped 6-string electric fret board, from which I was hoping to harvest the rosewood to do this. Nor do I have any other similar-looking timber large enough to substitute. So in the spirit of 'near enough is good enough' I'm going to use some Tas oak and stain it an intense dark brown. It's only the edges of the wedge that will be visible, so I'm hoping any obvious signs of discrepancy won't draw too much attention to itself. I've just cut a 1mm sliver off a random plank I had lying around, attempting to taper it somewhat towards nothing at one end on the bandsaw. Don't mind the holes, they'll be hidden underneath the fret board... ...Or do mind the holes, if you prefer, and know that I placed them there for optimum tonal transfer : Here's an idea for how to secure such thin bits of timber when thinning down and shaping. I don't normally like the superglue-and-masking-tape method of attaching router templates to wood because it can be a real pig to try and separate the two once you're done, but on thin flexible pieces it actually works pretty well. Apply masking tape to a flat substrate of some kind (in this case some 6mm MDF), attach masking tape to the underside of the shim, apply a thin zig-zag drizzle of CA to one side and press together for a minute or so. Wen you're finished a thin pallet knife worked in underneath the tape will lift it away from the MDF and allow you to peel off the tape from the shim without damaging anything. A combination of block plane, scraper and sanding blocks help flatten the shim down to the desired taper and thickness. I'm aiming for about 0.6mm at the thick end, over an effective length of about 50mm: Then pop the shim into the gap on the guitar and trace around the edges to work out where to trim it down. Once it gets this thin it's easy to trim it down using a decent pair of scissors: Then glue and clamp it in place with a flat caul on the underside of the fret board. The melamine chipboard is handy because any glue squeeze-out that gets on the caul won't adhere to it:

You could always fire off an email to the guy who runs the Jazzgitarren website and ask him directly about the guitar. The description he gives on the page implies that he owns the example shown there. It's an old site, but you might get lucky and get a reply out of him?

This is ridiculous BS To be fair, you are basing that solely on the look of the Saturn versus your experiences with other brands. It may be the case that the Saturn was built using a similar method you found in the Ovation, but without physically inspecting a Saturn it's not really known that it actually was.

Who doesn't like flogging the dead horse? Something that this discussion triggered in the back of my dim mind was a study performed a couple of years ago. I thought I'd lost the link to the original paper, but I've just managed to locate it again. You can read it here if you're really looking for some time to kill. The crux of the experiment was to take six identically-made acoustic guitars, but use different materials for the back and sides and test to see if players could make any judgements on the instruments based on the sounds emitted as a result of the different materials used. After a not-insignificant amount of work they concluded that different species of back and side woods made no statistically significant difference to the perceived sound of the instrument. The main content of the paper centred around asking the players to rate the guitars based on a number of different qualities. I suspect that this particular component of the experiment was fundamentally flawed, as the questions being asked of the players (how do you rate the brightness? How warm does the guitar sound? How defined is the guitar sound? etc) could mean different things to different people, leading to randomised results. There also appears to have been no control guitar used in the study to verify that the testing methodology was sound. You could also argue that the six guitars were...well, six different guitars and even if the back and sides were made from the same material in all six there'd be enough variance in them to make them all subtly different anyway. However. There was a less-publicised component of their experiment that perhaps offers more interesting and useful data, whereby a group of the same players underwent an ABX test. Each player was offered one guitar from a bank of three different instruments with varying back and side materials and allowed to play it blind for a period of time (guitar A). They were then offered a second guitar from the same batch of three to play it blind for a period (guitar B). They were then offered one of the two guitars they had just played and asked to identify if it was guitar A or B they were now playing (guitar X). The results again indicate that no-one could reliably identify guitar A or B any better than a coin toss. While the study was primarily concerned about acoustic guitars, it does beg the question that if the data suggested that reliable identification of just two acoustic instruments (arguably where wood choice plays a larger role in the sound produced) played back-to-back was nearly non-existent, how much credence should we put in to identifying sonic characteristics of the wood used in a solid body electric guitar?

Not if you also want to split one of the humbuckers at the same time (at least, not without resorting to a different switching method). Possible ideas: Telecaster 2-pole 3-position switch could give you Bridge H -> Bridge H split (or Neck H split, but not both) -> Neck H. Piezo could be added with a mini toggle, push/pull or just on a direct blend, but you couldn't wire it so that it 'knew' to only be active in the middle position. Try to get your hands on the switch used in the Ernie Ball John Petrucci model guitar. I ***think*** what you want to do can be done with this switch, but I can't say for certain without having one in my hands and analysing the switching pattern of all the contacts. Downside - it may be hard to get hold of and will be priced accordingly. A rotary switch with enough contact wafers fitted will do all the right things, but you have to want a rotary switch. Not everyone likes them. I have one on a PRS Custom 22, and I find it's totally impractical if you want to quickly flick between one pickup setting and another. I take it this is some kind of ultralight guitar? 8% of the total weight makes the whole thing about 6.25 pounds, which is pretty light for an electric. Either that or 0.5 pounds seems heavy for one pickup (two 7-string humbuckers I have here barely weigh 0.5lb combined).

You could probably take your construction cues from other semi/hollow bodied guitars that are fitted with something like a Bigsby. I've not handled such a guitar but it would make mechanical sense that the area underneath the Bigsby would need to be reinforced in some way in order to allow the arm to be depressed without deforming the top. That could be a centre 'log' running the full length of the body, or some kind of post underneath maybe? The bolt-on neck and apparent Tune-o-matic studs could also be clues that perhaps there is something solid under most, if not all of the centre of the body.

The wiring is already fairly complex based on your requirement of additional piezo - factor in a battery and onboard preamp/mixer of some kind for blending the split bridge pickup and piezo - so adding a P90 in the middle is not going to place much of an additional burden on the installation works from a wiring point of view. I'd be more concerned about how to implement this kind of switching using a 3-way switch. What you're asking for (even without adding the P90 to the mix) is beyond what a regular Gibson or Tele-style switch can do, so you're either looking at something esoteric and really hard to come by, or some kind of rotary switch which you'd have to decide if that fits your requirements, both visually and ergonomically. Additional string pull - is that really an issue in practice? Whatever extra pull there might be going from 2 humbuckers to 2 humbuckers and a P90 would surely be pretty insignificant? Same goes for added weight of an extra P90 compared to the total weight of the guitar.

Consider it done

I'm with you, I suspect the function of this control changed with revisions to the model. A rotary with functions 0/1/1+2/2 sounds like a pickup selector. The guitar that shows this option also lacks the big chrome toggle switch above the pickups. Photos of models without the 0/1/2 control have the toggle switch, T/B/-/+ etc sounds like a fixed treble and bass boost/cut function. Easy enough to do using passive circuitry, but without further details of what's going on inside the guitar it'd be anyone's guess precisely how they've gone about it at a component level. A lot of the text in those descriptions use words like 'seems' and 'appears', so I'd also take their understanding of those functions with a grain of salt - they either don't really know what those controls do or don't know if they're working properly There appear to be a lot of different variations on this guitar out there. You're going to have fun trying to decide on a definitive version to base your build on. Not aure. On the versions with the shorter tailpiece plate it appears (there's that word again...) that it wouldn't still be long enough to attach the tremolo mechanism if you moved it as far forward as it appears in the longer tailpiece version. I think it's just another version of a similar thing.

The use of a linear pot is the reason you're finding the last couple of notches above zero are the most difficult to control. You want to use an audio taper, aka logarithmic taper pot for a volume control, not linear. Almost all pickup makers will offer something bright and high-output. Your choices shouldn't be down to one specific manufacturer as such. Are actives an option? Your requirements for the bands and music styles is pretty broad given you only want a dual humbucker config with three switchable combinations. I'm a little unclear - are you wanting piezo in the middle position or split humbuckers?

It will work fine on 12V. May have slightly different gain characteristics compared to 9V, but will still operate the same way. The 22k resistor may need to be changed in order to get it to bias properly, but that's also the case with it running at 9V too.