curtisa

Attach the neck to the body and lay a straight edge (say, a 1m long steel ruler) along the edge of the neck on the bass side. Trace a line from where the straight edge extends past the end of the neck across the length of the body. Repeat the process for the treble side of the neck. You'll end up with two lines drawn on the body that taper slightly, and can be used as projection alignment marks for the bridge. Measure from the nut to the 12th fret along the bass side of the neck and double this value. Place the ruler along the bass side of the neck and mark this doubled value on the bass-side line you just marked on the body. Repeat the same process along the treble side of the neck and mark the treble-side line on the body. Join the two marks on the body with a perpendicular line. If you measure the length of this line and divide by two you will have the centre point of the strings and neck You can then use this perpendicular line and centre point to align the Floyd Rose templates with.

Is there a good ground connection from strings (bridge ground) to the rest of the grounded components? That could account for the hum getting better when touching any metal component except the strings.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that method. I do the same exact thing myself.

Well done, Mike. No use name dropping us in your entry - flattery will get you nowhere. Now start sucking more to give others a chance

Correct - two coils in series for the whole humbucker would yield 7.5k. If you can tighten up the winding pattern you might be able to achieve some of the values quoted in the 'machine' winds and therefore get more output. With 3.75k per coil it will work, but it will be a bit on the weak side. Only real way to find out is to build it and see how it sounds.

Use a pickup winding calculator to estimate how much wire you'll fit on the bobbin: http://www.jdguitarworks.com/coil/coil.html Note that the calculator is written assuming you want to target a specific resistance. You have to work backwards a little bit and adjust the resistance and bobbin specs until the resultant number of turns provided by the calculator becomes <= 5000. Pick a bobbin style ('Strat 1967' is a good start, you'll tweak the stock values in a second), AWG size and insulation build thickness. Leave the resistance value as-is. In the 'Bobbin Core Dimensions' table adjust the presented measurements to match the bobbin you want to use. Note that the presented names of the dimensions are a bit vague, but should correspond with the following measurements of your bobbin: Hit the 'Calculate' button and have a look at the 'max winds' entry on the table, which tells you how many turns you can fit on the bobbin given the dimensions and wire gauge you selected. Pick the result in the column based on how good you think you can do your winding, from 'Loose Scatter' to 'Tight Machine'. Ignore the 'Perfect' column. You can also refine the results further by tweaking the resistance to work out exactly the pickup winding specs you'll end up with. If, after you press the 'Calculate' button you see any of the presented values are red, they are indicating that the resistance you entered, using the bobbin/wire parameters you selected, will not fit in the bobbin. Reduce the resistance and try again. Try also switching between AWG42 and AWG44. Don't select anything finer than AWG44, as the wire is hard to get and impossible to work with. As an example, if I use the 'Strat 1967' option, AWG44, insulation build = single, resistance = 7100, leave the bobbin dimensions as-is and only change the length to 1.7" (I don't know if this is a realistic value for a uke pickup bobbin?) I get the following results. None of the values are red which suggests the pickup is achievable even if hand-wound with a fair degree of slop:

Is that still the case with Lace Sensors? All the sound demos I can find for the pickups do the in-between Strat thing as you'd expect any in-between Strat, and no-one mentions the poor noise performance in those positions. OP mentions preferring SRV, Hendrix or Meyer. Certainly Jimi would've pre-dated the age of hot-hodding with aftermarket pickups, and SRV was known to use stock Strats (or at least, Strats with stock parts pulled together from various sources and eras). If you're chasing that sound maybe focus on pickups that advertise their close affinity with pickups of the period they're trying to emulate - from the 50s and 60s. A lot of the info about Meyer's guitars seem to indicate that the specs for his signature Black Strat was based heavily on the Fender SRV model from 1996, which came with Texas Specials. Again, these were based on stock (overwound) Fender singles from the 50s/60s. Whether Meyer copied the choice of pickups into his own model..? It probably wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that would be the case.

Now you're using a stepper motor with a TMC driver, any reason you wouldn't use direct drive instead of belt drive? If you limit the acceleration/deceleration ramps you'd avoid any issues with excess torque as the rotating drum speeds up/slows down upsetting the stepper/driver

The implementation of the volume controls is not typical - normally you'd expect to see all three legs of the pot wired in a variable divider arrangement, but in the Hagstrom's they all appear to be wired as two-leg variable resistance rheostats. The taper of the pot may become more pronounced if it's a logarithmic (maybe linear is more appropriate?). As an alternative you could try re-wiring the volume pot as a variable divider, as just about every other guitar manufacturer would do (more work though): That's quite the rare bird then. I'd also be suspicious that a lot of the 'attachments' to the back of the switch PCB are non-standard. The 6.8 (cap? resistor? I'm having doubts now...) in series with what looks like another cap (the green cylindrical object) is very odd. Edit: the 'k' used on older caps sometimes signified 'kilo', so '6.8k5' may be 6.8pF x 1000 = 6.8nF (nano). But a capacitor with a 'K' suffix can also mean it has a tolerance of 10%. Not very helpful... Probably the most foolproof thing to do is grab a multimeter with a capacitance function on it and see if it measures 6.8pF/68pF/6.8nF. Or even if it measures 6.8/68/6800 ohms??

The sound should be cut off at zero for either pot. If it gradually tapers off and then suddenly disappears altogether near the very end of the pot's rotation it may be due to the taper of the pot (perhaps it's a linear taper pot where a more appropriate taper would be logarithmic?). It's a ceramic capacitor. They are sometimes manufactured in axial format with the leads exiting either end of the body rather than at the bottom corners. Value most likely 68pF (pico Farad), or 6.8pF if you think there's a decimal point in there. You have it correct. Which particular model is this one?

Your biggest challenge in that case is working out how to manage the taper of the LED/LDR combo. I would imagine any effects box with a continuous control input is probably expecting a linear taper 'pot'. Morley would have done their best to make the taper of the BH frequency sweep appear linear to the ear, but is probably something different in reality (some sources quote an 'S' taper?). Many years ago I used to have a Digitech RP6 floor unit that had a built-in expression pedal. It also used a LED/LDR mechanism for the variable resistor control. It had the annoying habit of drifting slowly over time so that the toe position would gradually lose some of its maximum range. Was less of an issue with the wah and volume functions, but made it totally unusable for the built-in Whammy effect. The only way to get it back to normal was to do a factory reset, thereby wiping out all my stored patches!

There are examples out there of *rotating* speakers (I think Conn used to make one for their organs), but they're more unusual and rare. The speaker electrical terminations were indeed brush connections on a slip ring. I suspect they're less common because the brushes would probably require regular maintenance and replacement as they wear out.

In the original Leslie the treble speaker operates on the same principle as the bass - a fixed speaker firing into a rotating diffuser. The difference with the treble speaker is that the diffuser used looks kinda like two trumpet bells pointing away from each other, but only one is hollow and transmits sound. The other one just acts as a counterbalance for the rotating mechanism.

I see you've...vandal-eyesed...your machine.

Yikes - I still haven't taken final pics! You can cut through the 15th fret if you like and leave the fretboard extension over the body in place. In the photos in this thread you can see that the dovetail stops pretty much underneath the 15th, which coincidentally is also the point where you'd inject steam in if you were trying to separate the glue joint using a steamer contraption (the 'traditional' steam entry point of the 14th fret isn't applicable for these Yamahas). If you have an old clothes iron and a metal spatula it isn't that much extra work to separate the fretboard overhang though. I'd recommend trying it out. You do more damage cutting through the heel if you go for the approach I used anyway.

Nice work! FWIW, the Fender Vibratone has a fully-sealed cabinet with 'letterbox' openings at the top, both sides and along the bottom on the front baffle. The speaker in the Vibratone faces forward and the rotating drum directs the sound outwards towards the floor/ceiling as it spins, whereas yours is more like the original Leslie with the drum directing the sound outwards towards the walls. Your cutouts would therefore make the most sense on the sides and front of the cabinet.

What you could do is make it a bit like a surfboard. Cast yourself an oversized block of the stuff and then cut/shape/machine/sand etc the body wings down to your desired profile. The foam section(s) could be skinned in fibreglass and then glued to either side of the neck-thru section to make an extremely light but rigid body. Similar construction techniques are used by radio controlled aircraft hobbyists. You can buy precast sheets of the recommended foam from various outlets if you don't want the mess of handling the raw chemicals.

Might depend a bit on the particular epoxy expanding foam product you're looking at, but I'd be leery about how much strength is in such products. At the very least you're probably looking at some kind of neck-thru construction where the neck bears all the tension from the strings and mounting points for the bridge; the epoxy foam could only be used in non-load bearing structures of the guitar (the body wings). The MSDS for the first product result I got in Google suggests that the most-dense foam variety (PD600) when set has a modulus of elasticity of 468N/mm2 and a shear strength of 13.4N/mm2, which works out to 0.468GPA and 0.0134GPA respectively. For comparison a piece of mahogany is around 8GPA MoE and 6GPA shear strength - about 20 times less bendy and 400 times less break-y. You couldn't embed a screw into the stuff and use it to mount a bridge, for example. The other thing to consider is that the stuff gets HOT when curing. Epoxy is exothermic by nature, and the expanding stuff even more so. Datasheet shows temperatures of up to 180 degC depending on the casting thickness and expansion amount for several hours. That's a lot of heat to manage while it's curing. You have to work quickly too, as the datasheet suggests a working time of only 4 minutes once mixed up. Not a completely mad idea, but one that would require pretty careful planning and thought to pull off successfully.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'a gap' Do you mean this: Compared to this?:

Same as the Vibratone, then. It uses polystyrene foam for the baffle too, The motor is some kind of specialised 2-speed AC synchronous thing running direct from the 240V mains. Really keen to see how yours comes out. If you need me to provide any details on my unit just shout out. It's been a while since I fired it up.

Neat little project! I have an old Fender Vibratone that I restored from a semi-destroyed state a number of years ago that is essentially what you're doing - a single 12" speaker firing into a Leslie-style rotating baffle with no amp. Leslie also made their own version of it simply called the '16' or 'Model 16'. Stevie Ray Vaughan was a well-known user of it on the tune 'Cold Shot'. Any thoughts on how you're going to make the rotary baffle? That and the mechanical arrangement of motor, pulleys and speed control (if you're going that way ) will likely be the most difficult part of the job.

Buy whatever wire you can get your hands on that is still easy to work with - there's nothing magical about guitar-centric brands or buzzwords. AWG 18 - 22 is perfectly OK. Avoid solid core wire, stick to stranded. You may be able to get wire for free if you re-purpose something that is being thrown away - say the power lead from an old broken plugpack. I assume you mean the little slide switch on the upper horn? Again, whatever works both physically (does it fit the hole in the guitar?) and electrically (does it have the right number of contacts and do the right thing when you operate it?). Your only real concern then should be about spending money on a switch that is robust enough to go the distance.

Could be loads of reasons - TL074 might have been cheaper, Morley might have already had a standardised stock item with several hundred thousand on hand, maybe something about the sound..?

It's a pedal with a 9V battery clip Battery usage was definitely considered by the designers. Although as @Prostheta mentions, he plans to use this on a power pack, so he's free to use whatever opamps he feels like and throw caution to the wind with regards to power consumption. Probably a good thing. For some reason I'm more reminded of this:

Nice! My first and only wah was a Morley Pro Series Wah (the first version with the red label). I seem to recall that the PCB in that was also partially populated, so I assume it could be reconfigured to be other products in the Pro Series range, like the volume and distortion variants. LDRs are notoriously variable in their characteristics, even within the same batch. Morley probably buy some generic component in large volumes and do some kind of screening on them to make sure they're using LDRs with vaguely similar characteristics, so the pedals behave in a predictable way. You're right that any LDR will probably work; it's just that you might find some work better than others. This could be affecting the limits of the 'heel' and 'toe' positions, or the taper as the treadle is moved from one end to the other. The apparent rarity of the specific component is probably down to Morley doing all the leg work to weed out the non-compliant versions for their products. Edit: LDR1 is only used to switch the effect on and off, so yes - any LDR should work. LDRs are usually made using cadmium sulfide - it's the cadmium that makes them unwanted in the EU. Not sure if there's enough Cd in them to make it impossible to buy in your neck of the woods, though? TL064 might be preferred in situations where battery longevity is a concern - they're about a quarter as hungry as their bigger brother, even if only marginally noisier.