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curtisa

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Everything posted by curtisa

  1. A 20+ year old guitar with an active preamp system was made in a time when the saturation of wireless technology was much lower than it is now. It's possible that the preamp was designed to accept and cope with interference of a much lower magnitude than what we experience today. No doubt if the guitar was re-released now the preamp would need to be designed to have a greater resilience to external noise sources. You've not specified whether this copper shielding is connected to ground as well, but unless it is grounded it will have no sheilding ability against external interference (and in some circumstances, can even make the noise worse). Other easy things to try: Confirm you have a fresh battery installed. Confirm it's not whatever you're plugging in to (amp, PC audio interface, mixing desk etc) is picking up the noise. Confirm your lead is good. Prevention may be the best cure. Put some distance between yourself and wireless sources. Turn your mobile and/or wireless router off at gigs or when recording. Years ago in the bad old days when I was still gigging, we had to remember to turn our old GSM mobiles off to prevent the inevitable bursty signals from being picked up in our amps and PA as the phone searched for the nearest cell tower every hour or so. It just became a default thing we had to do back then to deal with the issue. Contact Godin to see if they can offer any insight into the issue. It may be a recognised problem with the older A6.
  2. No need to stress over the decision. Go with whichever way you feel is right and within your capabilities.
  3. This video suggests they're machined from a solid piece of timber.
  4. If the supplied value is truly 22nF, it won't be the value of the cap that is causing the issue. An easy check is to look for any markings on the cap. For 22nF it may have '22n' or '223' or 0.022' printed on the side. If the value is correct, then look for other problems that might prevent the tone circuit from working - a missing ground connection on the tone pot, missing wiring from the tone pot to the volume pot/pickups/output jack (as required), a faulty tone pot. The 'traditional' tone circuit used in most guitars is pretty simple - one cap, one pot and two connections. It's hard to get it wrong.
  5. Nice work, Andy, despite the last minute hurdles. It's a shame about the design flaws in the Schaller electronics. They've probably thought they'd done the right thing by making everything plug-and-playable for those people who aren't so good with a soldering iron, but in doing so they've come up with a system that isn't fit for purpose in the real world. If I'm using EMGs on a build I'll throw away anything with their quick connectors (except for the pickups) and hard solder everything else.
  6. Interesting effect, I like it. It almost looks like what you'd get if you could apply gold anodising to wood instead of aluminium.
  7. You can fill the pores of the timber with dark filler and sand it back flush to accentuate the grain patterns. Or if the timber has any quilting or fiddleback in it, you can combine dark dyes and stains followed by lighter shades to give you that 3D Paul Reed Smith rippled effect. In most cases, that's all you really need to start building a guitar
  8. C'mon now. This wouldn't be a legitimate Projectguitar thread if there wasn't a hijack going on somewhere. Ahem... Carry on, @Flamesong
  9. One day we're going to see the whole guitar instead of just little glimpses of it.
  10. @pan_kara is doing some interesting experiments at the moment on the differences in sound between a high-end Schaller Hannes bridge and a cheap no-name one on the same guitar. Very interesting to read about. That's actually one thing I haven't seen mentioned in any discussions regarding the differences in sound between timbers. A method describing how to remove that most variable part of the equation - the player. Some kind of mechanical contraption that replicates the action of a pick striking a string repeatedly with no variation between strikes would go a long way to validating some tests on the effect wood imparts on the sound of the guitar. The best I've seen to date is a ruler swung down onto the string from a fixed height.
  11. Yep, I understand. I was being facetious (hence the winky-smiley face at the end of my comment). Maybe I should've said 'if you gave a drummer a guitar painted in an opaque...' I reckon there just wasn't enough mojo in your banjo. Or maybe not enough beer at rehearsal...or too much, even?
  12. The argument there, in that case, seems to be that 'looks mean everything, the sound of the wood means nothing' (which for all I know, could actually be the case...) If you gave a player a guitar painted in an opaque colour and told him the body was made of Honduran Mahogany, but didn't tell him it was actually made of plywood, would his assumption that he was playing an exotic-bodied instrument influence his opinion of the tone? Or change his playing style?
  13. I'd like to see the opposite extreme; to see what happens when there is no body. Ie, what would be the effect of running six strings in open air between two decoupled anchor points. The 'body' in that instance would have zero mass. What would the effect on sustain be then? Sounds like a pretty good philosophy. Taking it another way, how many times have you listened to a recording or been at a gig and thought, 'gee that Les Paul sounds sooooo mahogany', or 'I don't like his tone much. If only his guitar had been made of Alder'.
  14. IMO there is not very much convincing evidence that timber x with density y and weight z will give more sustain than another piece of timber. A denser timber used in a solidbody electric guitar may increase sustain, but there are plenty of other factors that could influence sustain too - bridge type (trem or hardtail), bridge material, string anchoring (through-body or top mounting), scale length, string gauge, trem setup (fully floating, locked to body, number of pivot screws, block size and material), semi-hollow/chambered/completely solid body, any acoustic feedback you may experience while plugged into an amp, the playing style of the person using the guitar...Some may have a big influence, some may not. A lot of the 'tonewood' debate tends to vanish into directionless point-scoring and personal opinions. It's notoriously difficult to measure, prove or disprove anything regarding the use of certain species of wood in electric guitars. I personally suspect any differences in sustain between, say a rosewood fretboard and ebony fretboard will also be completely inaudible in a band situation. Could it even be measured in that situation? Acoustic guitars I can see value in selecting certain types of wood with a minimum stiffness and weight that might exhibit a particular resonance when struck. The whole body is responsible for the sound that is projected from the guitar. Electric guitars, not so much. Others may disagree with me here, and of course everyone is welcome and entitled to their own views on the matter, but I prefer to simply make an electric guitar using timbers that are stable and look appealing, and let the sound of the guitar take care of itself.
  15. I assume this 'bridge on' switch just adds the bridge pickup to whatever pickup combination is currently selected? Post a picture of your wiring around the push-pull switch and volume pot. I reckon it's a pretty easy fix.
  16. That, to me, looks like a classic case of feeding the workpiece into the rotating cutter such that you're routing 'uphill' against the grain of the timber. There are ways of strategically changing direction when routing that will minimise (if not eliminate) this from happening so that you only route 'downhill', but you do need to work with cutters that have bearings on top and bottom. I made a brief write-up about this topic a while back. You may find it useful for future reference:
  17. I reckon you'd be better off asking your question over at a forum such as this one. Biasing a 4x EL34 amp is likely to be pretty trivial provided you have the right equipment, take the correct safety precautions and accept the risks of working on your own amp. If anyone can show you how it's done, you'll have better luck over at the Music Electronics Forum.
  18. As long as you've identified them, it's a good start. Down here at least, 5mm and 10mm 'things' can generally be found that can substitute as spacers - aluminium flat bars and acrylic plastic sheets can be had in those sizes.
  19. Bridge looks to be made of copper, or at least a copper-plated non-ferrous alloy of some kind.
  20. I'm using MGN15 knockoffs on mine, but I'm also using the smaller 3030 metric profile extrusions. There's plenty of meat on the smaller extrusions for the 15mm rail to sit on. Although, how well the 3030 extrusions will work over a much longer frame such as yours may need some re-thinking. Quality of the rails and bearings seems decent. I had one carriage out of 12 that felt quite 'crunchy' when under load though. I initially thought I'd have to order a replacement until I decided to disassemble it and found it just had some fine steel shavings stuck in the ball race channels. While that doesn't really point to fantastic quality control on the part of the manufacturer, provided you don't mind pulling things apart it was completely salvageable without having to make a claim with the seller or order more parts. You get what you pay for. Despite what many people think of the Chinese auctions, the sellers who have been in the game for any length of time do actually want to help you if things aren't what you expect. 9 times out of 10 they will attempt to rectify things if you approach them reasonably with a fault in one of your purchases. It does look big. You sure you want to make it big enough for the worst case, or just big enough to cover most reasonable situations I will say that if you want to make it bolt-together firendly, also consider how each component can fit together without resorting to odd sized spacers and shims. The combined height of the rails/bearing blocks vs the X axis leadscrew mounting brackets are one example.
  21. What about testing with a modelling amp or PC with VST amps installed? Different pickups will work with different styles of music, so why not cater to those styles by having as many amps at your disposal at minimal cost?
  22. Given the limitations of the building materials and budget, I reckon you'll be fine running the rails as you have shown it in your pic. I'd continue on with the design as you have it. The intent is to mill timber, not titanium. And a 600mm wide gantry made from MDF and a bit of Al isn't going to weigh dozens of kilos. The way you have the rails on the sides also gives you the option of replacing them with Hiwins later on with minimal work to the frame, as they're perfectly capable of being mounted in that configuration too. Probably all you'd need to do is make up some spacer blocks to bridge the gap left by the wider SBR bearings to the gantry sides when they get replaced.
  23. I meant, you appear to have used Hiwin equivalent rails/bearings on your build. Mike.Mara is looking at using supported rail (coded 'SBR' by Chinese auction sites) which may have limitations on which way around they are oriented for maximum strength. My comments referred to installing the SBR rails in the same configuration as your method to give maximum strength to a product that may already have inherent weaknesses.
  24. For all I know the recommendations may have originated from people poo-pooing the idea of using those rails for a machine being designed to mill steel. Your scope is a bit more relaxed than that, so it may not be a problem in the long run. Anyone trying to mill steel on a MDF machine is likely to destroy the frame and gantry before the bearings give way. As Mike has suggested - one rail top, one rail under. You're also using profiled rails and carriages, which are designed to withstand more force in directions other than perpendicular to the bearing mounting face. Although, the same principle applies to the supported rails that @Mike.Mara is looking at. - they're probably not as resilient as the Hiwin types, but mounting over and under will maximise their strength and stability given the circumstances.
  25. Router with pattern bits and a straight edge to follow will give you pretty good straight cuts with a perpendicular edge, which will get you out of trouble for most of the major components. Most of the parts in a CNC are in pairs, so once you've made one of a widget, you can use that widget as a template for the next one. Mike's printed labels as templates is a good idea, whether you work with Al or MDF, provided you can verify your printer is generating accurate images first. MDF to begin with. Your picture of the two bed designs is a good starting point. The MDF version can be stiffened up a lot by adding cross members as you've done with the Al version. When I was researching my build, the comments I saw floating around about running those types of rails and bearings in the orientation you have done made me a bit leery of using them. The impression I got was that the open-sided bearings that fit those rails will give better results when the forces pressing down on them are mostly in the opposite direction to the open side. The suggestion I saw was that if you swing the rails around 90 degrees so that the bearing runs on top of the bed it may be better in the long run, preventing the bearing openings from stretching under the forces and static weight of the gantry.
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