curtisa

I avoid the plague, cause it leaves me in a bind. ...carry on...

It's OK, Andy. We're all mature adults around these parts. You don't have to censor yourself when you say words like 'fifty' or 'fatty'. Nice looking ukelele you've got there. Does it do 'When I'm Cleaning Windows'? All ribbing aside, you've excelled yourself once again. Any chance you could make your next instrument suck a bit so the rest of us have a fighting chance?

That makes absolutely no sense at all why swapping the pickup leads would cause that behaviour, but anyhoo; glad you got it working Colour codes don't mean anything for pickup wiring. They're just provided to make each wire easily identifiable from the next. Defined wire colour codes don't have any real meaning unless you're dealing with things like industrial and domestic mains wiring, where there is a legal obligation to follow particular standards or regulations for identifying wires and cables.

Without seeing the actual guitar, I'm completely banjaxed. There has to be a wiring error in there somewhere.

So you're running a P-bass pickup pair but each element of the pair has their own volume controls? Provided you have wired it exactly as you've shown it drawn in the first post I can't see why it shouldn't work: Both volume pots down = no output Volume 1 up/volume 2 down = pickup 1 should be heard Volume 1 down/volume 2 up = pickup 2 should be heard Both volumes up = both pickups should be heard The resistance and taper of the volume pots shouldn't matter. Linear/log taper will just affect the apparent linear-ness (or lack of) of the volume of each pickup relative to the rotational position of the volume pot. 250K/500K will only affect relative output and brightness of the pickups Flipping the connections of one pickup shouldn't matter. Although if one is flipped and the other is not, with both volumes up you will find that the combined output will be much weedier-sounding due to the way the two pickup outputs combine - Is this perhaps what you're experiencing with both volumes cranked up? Not so much a total loss of volume, but a thinning out of the overall sound?

Yes! Most definitely! I have an old parafin wax candle I keep with the fret slotting saw that has dozens of little slices all over it where I've run the blade through every few slots precisely for this purpose. Also good for nut slotting too, particularly for the skinny meedly-meedly strings where the narrower files have a tendency to grab in the slot while being worked.

The pot case is metallic and conductive, so there's no real need to connect it to the cavity shielding with a dedicated wire. Bolting the pot through the cavity wall should be sufficient. As long as you can get a connection to any and all parts that must be tied to ground, that's all you need. If there is an air gap between two parts that must be grounded then you just need to find a way to bridge that gap, either by wire or by direct contact with each other.

Never fear. I am perfectly capable of right-royally screwing this up by hand without the aid of some glorified, computerised sawdust emitter.

If you look closely at the second pic from the top, there's a chipout in the middle of the neck-side of the neck pickup where the wavy grain was a bit weak. I'll have to fill borrow some of your ninja grain matching skills and fill it to match as best I can.

Well, the builders have been and gone, I have a house that will now stand upright for the rest of my life (fingers crossed), and a severely wounded bank balance. Workshop is still in a state of partial disassembly, but I can at least focus my attention on the CNC for a bit. Time to bite the bullet and commit endmill to timber, starting with the interior features located on the front of the body. Pickup cavities: Control holes for pots: Neck pocket: You may wonder why I'm only milling the outlines of these cavities rather than milling the full profile. There are a few reasons why I've personally decided to do this: The endmill cutters are quite a bit more expensive than your typical 1/4" router bit. I don't want to prematurely wear them down if I don't have to. Using one 1/4" endmill to do an entire cavity is quite inefficient. Lots of chips and dust to deal with. By just cutting the profile on the CNC I can come back later with a forstener drill bit to remove the excess and then tidy up the rest of a cavity using the hand router with a template bit while still retaining the accuracy of the outer edges afforded by the CNC. The CNC might be convenient at making this all as easy as possible with minimal hands-on, but it takes a fair bit of time to make large cavities. By reducing the cavities down to just the outlines and doing the hogging-out by hand later on, I can reduce the milling time down from 2 hours to about 30 minutes. I need to retain some level of hand-made quality to this thing Top face milling complete: Switch to a 1/8" endmill and do the bridge mounting and string-thru body holes. It's also possoble to see how tight I made the body blank fit the CNC'ed profile. There's less than a mm of timber left at the tail end of the body here, and about the same at the tip of the upper horn at the other end of the blank - there was absolutely no way I could afford to let this slip: Flip the body over and start the profiles on the rear. The battery compartment is only small so I elected to ignore my cut-profile-only rule and mill the whole thing in one go. Control cavity cover recess is also milled complete but the cavity itself will be hogged out and cleaned up by hand later on: Rear mounting of the string-thru ferrules, including milling the shouders to sit flush once installed: Rear milling complete: The next trick (once the workshop is back in some kind of functioning order) is to take it to the bandsaw and trace around the profile cut to extract it from the blank. There's a 1mm lip of timber left holding the body inside the blank after milling the body shape from both sides, plus some deliberate 'tabs' of wood strategically placed for added strength. That'll also be the point where I see exacly how successfully I've managed to align the front and back milling operations together.

Then there is an issue with the way it has been transferred from drawing board to guitar. The diagram you have drawn is correct. For comparison, here is the Fender Jazz Bass wiring. If you delete the tone pot and its attached capacitor, you have exactly what you've drawn:

Jayzus! OK, I can see where the mix up is now. This is like some weird optical illusion that changes everytime I look at it. Ignore everything I've said up till now. The definitive answer is: The very first one on the left that you posted at the top of this thread will give you independent volume control of each pickup without affecting the other. Everything else proposed will result in some degree of cross-influence between the two pots.

Dammit, you spoiled my fun. My second guess was going to be fiddleback MDF.

My apologies, I've misread the diagrams posted. The first one you posted on the left is the one you want. The one Mikro posted is the same as the diagram on the right. The righthand diagram/Mikro's diagram will give you that weird cross-influencing volume pot behaviour. The lefthand diagram will allow you to control the volume of one pickup without affecting the volume of the other. It's essentially the same as a stock Fender Jazz Bass wiring minus the tone control.

Ummm....Veneered chipboard?

Just checkin'...

Reversing lugs 1 and 2 on the pots in that configuration will leave you with the situation where rolling down either volume rolls down the output of both pickups simultaneously. The first diagram posted on the left (or @MiKro's diagram, they're the same thing) is the one you want. Configured that way, you can freely increase or decrease one pickup volume without interacting with the other. Just as a side note, don't sweat it with the concept of ground loops in a guitar. They're often misunderstood and cannot physically exist inside typical guitar wiring. Just because it looks like a loop of wire around the ground terminals does not make it a 'ground loop' in the truest sense, nor will it unleash the hums from hell if wired in such a way. Wire your grounds whichever way is most practical and makes the most sense. Provided your soldering is good you'll be rewarded with a perfectly quiet instrument where it matters

I would've thought you've already found the best way to determine its acoustic resonance - plugging it in and seeing which notes it wants to feed back on the most. I also would've thought that any acoustic resonance will far outweigh the inherent 'tap tone' the solid parts of the guitar may have, in which case it will always appear to resonate at B1. The chambers you've created are providing some acoustic amplification and will impart their own resonances (in this case, B1) to the overall sound when excited by the strings vibrational energy. Taking your beer bottle example, blowing across the top to excite the resonance inside the caivty gives its own distinctive pitch, but very little of the high-pitched 'ting' you get when hitting the side of the bottle with a hard object gets imparted into the tone you hear when exciting the acoustic resonance of the bottle's chamber.

I reckon we'd need to see some pics/diagrams of the circuitry to make any real suggestions. That sounds like you have at least two issues to resolve - a non-working three-way switch for the two humbuckers and no output from the single. All grounds should be shared. That means that the ground of the Fishman circuit, the bridge ground and the ground on the Lollar circuit all need to be wired together.

Yes, unfortunately the only way to mix active and passive is to effectively 'activate' the passive pickup, which may turn people off the idea ('how dare you make my passive Lollar an active pickup!?'). Either way, it's a fine looking guitar you've pulled together. Hope your client is pleased with the outcome

I guess the thing that doesn't sit right in my head is that by keeping the fretboard stationary and moving that conical segment across the length of the fretboard, the profile won't be transferred from the cone to the fretboard with the same dimensions. The way I see it, the only way you can transfer the 10" to 16" conical shape directly to the full length of the fretboard, with a linear radius gradient from nut to 24th fret, is if the radius block and fretboard don't move but the sandpaper does, a bit like a belt sander with a bed that has the compound radius cast into it. To my thinking, sanding using the compound radius block the 'traditional' way will give you a fretboard where the first couple of inches is 10" radius, the last couple of inches are 16" radius, (depending on how much overlap you introduce scrubbing the sanding block past the extremities of the fretboard) and the area in between will be a compacted taper from 10" to 16".

Very impressive. Is there some kind of technique you need to employ to prevent accidentally sanding a 10" and 16" 'flat spot' in the fretboard ends while sanding? I'm having trouble envisaging how you could use these with the traditional 'scrubbing' methods and get a consistent radius taper from one end of the fretboard to the other.

I assume the body already has the routing for a tremolo block and spring cavity? The drawing on the axetec website already gives you the post spacing (51mm), which should be equidistant either side of the centreline of the guitar (ie, +/- 25.5mm). I'd probably do a trial installation on a piece of scrap to see where everything sits once the posts are in. Then you can measure the distance from the posts to the saddles to gauge a nominal offset relative to your scale length. After that it should be no different to installing a 6-screw Fender trem, of which there should be plenty of examples out there. The post inserts should only be a firm press fit. If you need a hammer to get them in, the drill holes are too small; another good reason to do a trial fitting before committing to the actual body.

Yes, and if you look at photos of some variants of the Ibanez Jem (the guitar where I believe this switching pattern first originated), you will see the neck and bridge pickups with the screw slugs on opposite sides to allow this to happen. Normally in a HSH combo with the positions 2 & 4 Stratty 'quack', it's the middle single that is spec'ed as reverse wound/reverse polarity, as it would be for a regular Strat. It's easier and cheaper for the manufacturers to achieve this than reverse winding/reverse magnetising the two humbuckers on either side. That should mean that the coils you want to combine from each humbucker should have the opposite magnetic polarity compared with the middle single. Easily checked with a magnet - on the humbucker coils the magnet will be attracted to the slugs and on the single it will push away. Reversing the winding (if necessary) is then just a matter of swapping the solder connections on the single. Parallel is normally the way to do it, yes. But anything is possible given the right switch. No idea how it would sound; hotter/warmer than the equivalent parallel position 2 & 4 I would've thought? Series wiring on a Strat is fairly common mod, there appear the be a few Youtube videos out there that demonstrate what it sounds like.

If it's anything like the rest of the generic plantation-grown Eucalyptus varieties, it should work quite well for a neck or solidbody instrument. Straight grain, probably a bit plain-looking. Can be a bit heavy so if you make a solidbody out of it you might want to consider chambering. If it behaves like the hardware store stuff that's available down here it might be a little bit splintery across the grain when milling, but like any timber you can always work around that. FWIW, one of my previous builds used hardware-store Eucalyptus for the body and neck. The neck has been one of the most stable ones I've made to date.