Jump to content
Voting in Guitar of the Month April 2024 is now open! ×

curtisa

Forum Manager
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    3,728

  • Joined

  • Days Won

    152

 Content Type 

Everything posted by curtisa

  1. curtisa
    You can attach pictures directly to your posts, like you would when typing an email:
  2. curtisa
    Not mine. Just one that came up in Google. http://chordgen.rattree.co.uk/tensiontool.php
  3. curtisa
    It can still be done with a drill and chisels if you take care as you go. You already have the neck pocket and pickup cavities cut out, so all you have to do is match what is already there. @Andyjr1515 doesn't use a router much when creating cavities - have a look at his thread to see how he routes without a router Hondo has more street cred than the "Torch" I had. I remember getting the shock of my life when I chipped the corner off it one day and found plywood poking out underneath the paint. I dunno what I as expecting to find underneath the surface of a sub-$200 guitar??
  4. curtisa
    My first electric guitar was a cheap Chinese Strat copy. Body was all plywood, but I don't recall it being overly heavy.
  5. curtisa
    You could add a fourth layer of plywood to the body to effectively make the neck pocket deeper. That'd also have the advantage of covering the splintering around the selector switch hole to give you a second shot at drilling it cleanly. 1/4" thick plywood should be fairly easy to obtain, which is probably pretty close to how much deeper the neck pocket would need to be.
  6. curtisa
    Nope - there's no relation between cavity size and susceptibility to hum pickup. It looks a bit unusual, but yes, it will work. You'll get sound when the three-way switch is all the way over in position 1 and no sound for positions 2 and 3.
  7. curtisa
    The way you have it wired will connect the volume pot to the output jack for two of the three positions on the 3-way switch, and disconnect it for the third position. The problem with making it a connect/disconnect is that on the "disconnected" position it will be effectively the same as unplugging your lead and leaving it hanging in mid-air, ie very noisy. The better solution, and the way kill switches are normally installed, is to have the kill switch wired to short the output of the volume pot to ground. Wire the middle lug of your volume pot direct to the output jack and then use the two leads on your kill switch to connect across the two lugs on the output jack instead. You're missing a ground connection between the case of the tone pot and the case of the volume pot.
  8. curtisa
    Kauri is normally native to New Zealand. You've been lucky to get your hands on some up there. Came from some recycled furniture perhaps?
  9. curtisa
    Any reason you couldn't continue slicing the 1/4" off to just ahead of the nut and carry on building it with a purposely-exaggerated headstock back-step? You could even claim the increased nut break angle where the strings pass back to the tuners as being tone voodoo Or re-laminate a piece of contrasting timber onto the heel (make it a feature) and build the neck with a 1" nominal thickness prior to carving. The neck pocket might be a little deeper than a standard Tele, but the body should have more than enough meat to take it.
  10. curtisa
    Most likely the pickups are microphonic - the copper windings and/or other mechanical components of the pickups are loose enough to permit acoustic feedback to develop between guitar and amp, which manifests as high-pitched squealing. The usual fix is to wax-pot the pickups, whereby the pickup is immersed in a vat of liquified parafin wax and then subjected to a vacuum as the wax is cooled. Unless the pickups are particularly special, you're probably better off just replacing them with better quality units, rather than performing the wax potting. The cost of DIY wax-potting one set of pickups would probably outweigh the cost of some new Tonerider, GFS or Irongear budget pickups.
  11. curtisa
    About halfway down this page seems to suggest scale length minus 1/4" (eg, if scale length is 25.5", then mounting holes should be 25.25" from the nut). Although, if it were me I'd ignore any prescribed tables mentioning scale length minus x, as different bridges are built to different specs. I usually just rely on pushing the saddles as far forward as possible and positioning the bridge at the scale length based on where the break point on the saddles occur. This method has been discussed on the forums before. This should get you started. Note that the picture is viewed from above, and that the rear penetration of the sustain block route is wider than the top penetration by about 5mm. This 'undercut' is usually in the order of 3-5mm from the top surface.
  12. curtisa
    Seeing as the pickup is a clone of an EMG81, I reckon you're pretty safe in your assumptions of what each wire is.
  13. curtisa
    Moved to the Tech Area -> Electronics Chat for better house keeping.
  14. curtisa
    Is it the Kustom PC5065? There's a link to it here (third post down). It also has steady-state voltage measurements marked on it. Where is this measurement being taken from? The two transistors configured in that way is what's called a long tail pair. Under normal circumstances they will behave equally and oppositely as you describe. Ie, if one transistor is driven to push its output voltage down, the other will want to pull its voltage up. It's possible that the output is merely following the change occurring at the input. If the voltage at the input changes, then you're going to see a matching (bigger) change at the output as well. If cooling the input transistors results in an unexpected voltage change at the output, then I'd be focusing on checking if Q1 or Q2 have become thermally unstable. I'd also be looking at any nearby components that may have an impact on the stability of Q1 and Q2. Capacitors can go leaky with age, so C2, C3, C7 and C8 would be prime suspects too.
  15. curtisa
    Single coil pickups in isolation will naturally sound brighter than two singles in series, as you have when both neck and bridge are on. Seems that sound examples of the SB 400 are hard to come by, but this video of a SB 350 seems to suggest that the neck pickup is fairly bright sounding anyway (at about 8:50). Is that anything like what you're experiencing? You mentioned in the other thread that the pickups were re-wound, so you're probably stuck with whatever the pickup winder made. If they were re-wound as per the spec of the original units, then perhaps that's just the way they're meant to sound? If they were rewound to some other spec, who knows? Does the neck pickup sound like it's working correctly compared to the bridge (ignoring the overall brightness), or does it sound super-anaemic, even to the point of being hard to tell if its even on when both neck and bridge are on? In a passive guitar you're pretty much limited to making things "less treble-y" in order to give the impression of "more bass-y". That effectively means adding something that the tone control already does, ie cut some of the highs back. It can be fun and cheap to experiment with, but don't expect Megabass (tm)-like differences. Beyond that you're stuck with replacing the pickups with something with more oomph or using some kind of active eq/preamp...or turning the bass up on your amp
  16. curtisa
    This is a good start: http://www.tundraman.com/Guitars/NeckAngle/
  17. curtisa
    Neither. It depends what you want from the instrument. Flat mounting is easier to install because the cavity is easier to create, but means you can only dive down and the neck will likely require a shim to counteract the increased action. Recessed mounting allows you to raise or lower the trem and will probably mean you can do without a neck shim, but is more difficult to install because the cavity is more complex. Probably the same as a regular Strat trem cavity. Floyd Rose have routing diagrams on their website. Usually, yes. Do you mean, how to create a neck shim?
  18. curtisa
    I'm enjoying seeing the S9 return to the In Progress section of the forum. I spy a foot shot in your last post, too.
  19. curtisa
    My comparison with the 013s was only to illustrate the effect of stringing (nearly) the same set of top 4 strings over a longer scale length for the same pitch. The NW026 3rd on a "normal" guitar sounds...well...normal, but the PL026 over the shorter scale length causes problems with tone due to the higher mass and lower tension. Lower tension (PL024? PL022?) may also introduce other problems that you'll want to avoid - "squishier" feel, other tonal deficiencies such as "rubber banding". Your only recourse may simply be to lower the mass while keeping the tension up, ie, use a wound string of some type. Maybe a special instrument will simply demand a special string set, with the consequence of a special price tag attached to the strings? On the plus side, flat wound strings should last a bit longer before sounding noticeably duller than the equivalent round wounds, so perhaps the increase in longevity can justify the increase in price? D'Addario have a flatwound set (ECG26) that seems to go for about $11US on some online string supplier sites (just throw away the 5th and 6th strings from the pack). If you buy in bulk and share the shipping with some friends it is probably pretty good value.
  20. curtisa
    No other reason than they chose to make it that way. The Floyd Rose can be mounted flat to the top or installed in a cavity to permit upwards pitch bending if you chose. It's entirely the decision of the person installing the bridge on the guitar.
  21. curtisa
    Maybe look for 5 string bass-sized fret boards? Width is pretty much the same at the 24th fret, and more than enough length to cover your needs. The bigger problem will be locating a piece large enough to suit your needs in Australia. Ebony is listed in CITES under Appendix 2, which makes it a controlled import/export across borders. It's not impossible to buy from overseas, but most suppliers will simply not want to bother mailing you one piece of ebony because of the extra time and expense of doing the requisite paperwork. Same now applies to rosewood, unfortunately. There are several local species that work more than adequately as a fret board. If jet black and zero-grain is an aesthetic requirement, you could even japan-black/ebonise a piece of plain maple.
  22. curtisa
    The string tension for your nominal pitches over the 17" scale length seem quite low: That's nearly the same gauges for a typical 13-56 acoustic set (ignoring the wound 3rd string), and over a scale length of 25", that's barely half the tension: My gut feel is that you're not getting enough tension to get the string up to its optimum sweet spot for its intended pitch (look up String Inharmonicity), and the thicker plain 3rd is suffering the most due to its high mass and short scale length. I would have thought you'd have noticed other problems too, such as very poor intonation and extreme sensitivity to pitch variation when doing vibrato and bends. What gauges and materials does the tenor uke normally get string with? Could you go back to your previous PL-NW-NW-NW string configuration but substitute flatwounds for the three wound strings to avoid the string noise problems you were experiencing before?
  23. curtisa
    Glad to be of help.
  24. curtisa
    So you can wind it down from 10-2 and hear it gradually getting darker, and then from 2-0 it suddenly jumps up to full brightness instead of completely rolling down? I'd say the pot is faulty and would probably need replacing.
  25. curtisa
    Moved to the Tech Area -> Electronics Chat area for better housekeeping.
×
×
  • Create New...