curtisa

Is it wrong to 'like' that post?

Swirling? You're treading into dangerous territory here. I've got all my fingers crossed for you.

Nice one, Mr Jr. Looks like she'll be ready for the next Derbyshire glam rock revival festival. I trust Mick has a pair of glitter-encrusted platform boots and sequinned body suit to wear while playing this thing - they'll be a mandatory part of the uniform required in use.

It's right there, see? Do I win an incredible prize?

Depends what effect you're wanting. You can raise the bridge slightly to leave a small gap underneath to allow for a little bit of upwards movement on the arm, or flat-mount it to the body so that the arm can only go downwards, or route a shallow pocket for the trem to rest in so that it appears to be flat-mounted but can move up and down (much like a recessed Floyd Rose). The option with the 3mm gap underneath the plate may require the neck to be shimmed up, or with a slight downwards angle. More or less, although if you route the neck pocket too shallow and have to raise the bridge studs up to compensate it can look a bit odd. Regarding the trem routing, if it were me I'd bring the "top hole" forward towards the nut (or the bottom one further away). You want enough clearance for the trem block to swing backwards when you depress the arm fully. In all the trem routes I've seen and done the "lip" between the bottom hole and the top is at the back of the block route rather than the front. It also gives a little more meat for the trem posts to be fitted into.

My advice would be to route nothing until you have the trem on hand to confirm measurements with. I might have missed it, but what bridge are you using?

Could the radius beam you're routing be wobbling in the cradle, rather than the jig moving? Presumably you're feeding the beam through the cradle with the router clamped at a particular rotation, then swinging the router a smidge and repeating the process. If the blank piece of timber you're feeding through to create the radius beam doesn't have a flat back, or it goes in with a slight upwards angle you'd probably get a similar effect.

Don't know, although the old fashioned unsealed paper envelopes that Ernie Ball use in their packs will more than likely contribute to the problem. I'd much rather have the sealed plastic wrapper that D'Addario use any day. At least that way it won't matter that the strings have been sitting on the shelf for an unknown period of time before I buy them, because in the plastic bag moisture has no chance of getting to the strings and causing premature rusting.

Necrothread D'Addario EXL110s for sixers and EXL110-7 for the sevens here. As a young and impressionable whippersnapper I used to use Dean Markley Blue Steels only for the fact that Steve Vai was an endorsee of them Switched to D'Addarios after I realised that I couldn't tell the difference between them and the Blue Steels, and they cost 2/3 of the price. Bought three sets of Ernie Ball Slinkys for an eight string I made a few years ago, only because I needed some sets with the low F# included. Complete rubbish. All the plain strings came out of the packs with rust spots up and down each string. Not an unusual complaint about EB strings I've since been led to believe.

You could try a nail set punch from a hardware store. Even a large nail with the end ground off might work at a pinch. Years ago when I was making amps I used to buy brass eyelets from the fabric hobby store to make up circuit boards - the kind used to make eyelets for passing laces through material. The packs always came with a matching punch. Far cheaper than buying the eyelets and a punch from tube amp supply stores. Maybe there are smaller ones available from fabric stores too?

The second jack that splits the two pickup signals when the second lead is plugged in needs to be a switching jack with an isolated SPDT element. Something like this: https://www.musikding.de/63mm-Stereo-jack-isolated-with-2-SPDT-switches They should be reasonably easy to get at most any bricks and mortar electronics component store.

Moved to the Tech Area -> Electronics Chat section for better housekeeping.

Broken ground between output jack and rest of guitar circuitry, or missing ground from bridge studs would be my guess. The hum and buzz from a missing ground on the bridge studs would clear up if you rolled the volume pot on the guitar to zero. A missing ground from the output jack would make lots of noise whether you had the volume up or down. Unlikely. Shorting the output signal to ground will result in a complete absence of signal.

Don't think it can be done with that style of switch. I think what you need is something along the lines of a Oak Grigsby 2x5 way switch, where each of the five positions gets two independent solder tabs. Something like this: http://www.toneshapers.com/switch-5-way-oak-grigsby-2-pole-superswitch.html

Spoke wheel adjuster trussrods are one option that can look quite neat. You've already mentioned that you may only install one pickup, so the other option is to add a little pocket where the neck pickup would normally be to fit a regular allen key. Yamaha do this on some of their basses: It's also easier to stretch the D and G strings apart at the body end to fit the allen wrench into the truss rod adjuster, than it is to stretch the strings apart behind the nut. This means it's possible to adjust the trussrod while still strung up. It's a little more fiddly than adjusting at the nut end of the neck, but a lot less fiddly than making up an adaptor plate to hold the T4M nuts, or having to remove the D/G strings to be able to fit the allen wrench in. Thankyou. As far as I'm aware there are no basic formulae for describing the optimum balance. I will say that without the headstock and the weight of the tuners, a headless guitar naturally balances differently than a regular guitar, Predicting what to change for better balancing based on body shape alone will be a black art, but my gut feel is that your body shape would probably be fine. Klein Guitars, for example, are designed primarily for balance and ergonomics, and they look far more weighty than your design.

Sure - you could construct the neck that way. Essentially that's just building a neck and cutting the rest of the headstock off after the truss rod access. I don't see why it would be any weaker than a normal neck. It does mean that you'll have an unavoidable large gap between the zero fret and the string locks, and that you'll probably have to unstring the D and G any time you want to make a truss rod adjustment. Seems a bit at odds with the streamlined look and convenience of a headless guitar. But then again, if you had a guitar fitted with a Floyd Rose locking nut you'd have to unstring D and G to adjust the truss rod too.

If you're going to use the T4M hardware for your build, be careful how you plan the truss rod access. The T4M nuts need to individually screwed down onto the "head" end of the neck, and on a six string guitar the mounting screws of the D and G string locking nuts will be very close to the truss rod access. The risk is that either the screws won't have enough material to hold on to, or the screws will punch into the sides of the truss rod access. On a seven string headless I built using the T4M hardware I had to make up an adaptor plate to hold the nuts. The seven compounded the issue as the middle G nut was dead centre over the truss rod. The second time I used their hardware I made the truss rod access from the body end to avoid this problem: Most people position the truss rod so that the adjuster is pretty much directly under the nut, which usually places the end of the "bendy bit" about midway between the nut and the first fret. The rod doesn't need to run the full length of the neck. As there is so much mass where the neck meets the heel the truss rod would have no ability to bend that part of the neck anyway. On necks where the adjuster is accessed at the body end, the rod can't be positioned anywhere else but right at the heel, so there's a short section of the neck at the nut end that doesn't get the support of the truss rod. However, in practice this isn't really an issue, as the unsupported section is only a couple of inches long. Probably the simplest thing to do use use some dimensions from other guitars you're already familiar with. I spent a lot of time searching for "optimum" dimensions for the first neck I ever built, but in the end I realised that I already had necks on factory guitars in my collection that I could use as the basis for my first attempt. After I built a few more I got a feel as to what worked and what didn't and branched out from there with my own set of baseline dimensions.

I was under the impression that Stewmac were trying to encourge us to be 'real men'. Real men, as we all know, don't need instructions to program the VCR to do timer recording, erect a four-person tent or adjust a fret slotting mitre box

Quite possibly, but at the time I bought mine (a couple of years ago maybe?) it came with a noticable lack of accoutrements, with the exception of the allen wrenches to adjust everything.

If it's any consolation @Andyjr1515, the Stewmac mitre box that the G&W one is based on didn't come with setup instructions or integral clamps either.

For the most part I'd say it's a question of personal taste. There is no such thing as optimum scale length vs string guage when considereing a players' preference. If you prefer the tautness and/or tone of a 46 on the low E of a Strat and the looseness of a 10 on the high E of a Les Paul, then perhaps look at a scale fan of 24.75" to 25.5". My only real advice is to avoid really large scale fans for the hell of it. A six string guitar with a 25" - 28" fan may seem like a good idea for higher tension on the lower strings, but it will be a dog to play due to the severe angles the frets will be at the extremeties of the fretboard.

It wouldn't be a Project Guitar build thread without a few hiccups to deal with. On the upside we get to milk a few more bagpipe jokes while we wait.

I'm saying that as a starting point the high E saddle is moved nearly all the way forward, the bridge installed to the scale length based off that one saddle and everything else can then be adjusted for correct intonation from there without running out of adjustement range on the saddles. It doesn't actually make that much difference which saddle(s) you pick to move forward when placing the bridge. As long as the furthest-forward saddle is used as the initial placement it will work every time. The reasoning for using the high E as the basis is that it will require the least amount of intonation correction in order to play true in every position, whereas each lower string will require increasingly more compensation. By positioning off the high E you've giving yourself enough leeway for the remaining lower saddles to continuously be pushed further away from the nut to compensate for the increasing intonation errors that the thicker strings will have. Wouldn't matter. Irrespective of the string gauge, string material, action or base scale length, the string length still needs to be increased to slightly more than the nominal scale length to compensate for intonation innacuracy due to the bend the string must undergo when being depressed onto a fret. The bend increases pitch, which must be compensated by increasing scale length to offset this behaviour. On a guitar that was already built and set up for a certain string gauge, and the player wanted to switch to a different tuning or string gauge, I can see that some saddles may want to move forward, but the resulting saddle position will still be [scale length] + {a bit]. The low E will need the most compensation of all six strings. Trying to predict how much compensation without knowing what strings will be installed, how it will be tuned or how high the action will be set is nearly impossible (but perhaps guessable). However, assuming that the high E will be the closest to the actual scale length is a safer starting point. I'm not familiar with the story so I couldn't say - what gauge strings does he use, does he prefer to use new or old strings, was the guitar damaged, was it built correctly to begin with, did he know what he was doing (taking a Dremel to a custom sounds a bit extreme), But if anything it sounds like he would've been trying to get more backwards adjustability on the saddles to get the detuned A and E strings to intonate properly.

You're still missing the bridge ground, if what I'm seeing is correct. This is most likely why it is so noisy. I count four ground connections on the washer - one each from the two pickups, one on the cable that is (presumably) connecting to the output jack and one from the switch for position 3. Is the wire on the back of the tone pot your bridge ground? If so, it needs to also be connected to the washer.

I think there's some confusion as to what ground is for in this circuit. Ground is used to provide a return path and a reference point for current flow of the various electronic components inside the guitar. The pickups each need a ground and a hot lead connected in order for any sound to be generated, in the same way a 9V battery needs both its + and - terminals connected in order for it to power up a circuit. No ground, no sound. Ground can also have other uses - providing a noise shield against external interference or deliberately short circuiting signals to remove them from the output. It's also worth pointing out that ground does not exist inside any guitar until you plug the lead in. Ground is actually via your amp. The "ground" in the guitar is really just a collection point for all the parts of the circuit inside the guitar that need to be grounded further downstream at the amp's input socket. Your switching arrangement is basically [one pickup on] + {the other pickup on] + {all pickups off]. To get each pickup out of the switch you're just using it to select each of the hot leads in turn, plus the third position where you select nothing at all (although the removal of the volume pot in this iteration makes things a little more complicated now). Ground does not get switched here, You've correctly drawn the two required pickup grounds permanently tied together and then being passed back to the ground lug of the jack. My only extra suggestions would be to have a wire coming from the bridge and connecting to this ground point (this was in an earlier version of your diagram, so I assume you've just missed it out this time round), and find some way to ground any shielding that may be present in the guitar cavity. Removing the volume pot has also removed the reference to ground that the circuit has when you move the switch to the [all off] position, so while it will still work, it will also be quite noisy when you select this position. In order to correct this you need to add some extra wiring to make sure the 3rd position is properly silenced. Easiest way to do this is to add a wire from the third-from-the-left lug on the switch to the ground point. That way, when you selct position 3 you're actually selecting a dead short, which will kill the output completely. As long as this ground point does not accidentally make contact with any of the other electronic components within the guitar you should be good. This can even be as simple as soldering all three wires together and wrapping the soldered end in something insulating, Soldering to a washer and screwing it to the inside of the cavity is also fine, but is also more fiddly.