curtisa

What I meant with my initial suggestion about using the calculator...: ...was that going for finer wire to get a higher resistance pickup does not mean the pickup will be hotter. If you use the 'Strat 1967' option in the calculator aiming for a 10k pickup using 44AWG (easy to get) the pickup is entirely buildable using that sized bobbin. If you use 50AWG you can also build the pickup on the same bobbin, but because the cross-sectional area of the wire is much smaller the resistance per unit length is about 4 times higher than 44AWG. So if you aim for 10k resistance it'll just take fewer turns to get there. Less turns will yield a lower output pickup, so much less that the calculator is suggesting that the 50AWG version of the 10K pickup has about a third of the number of turns of the stock 'Strat 1967' pickup option with 42AWG, and will therefore have a third of the output. They might be using finer wire than AWG44, but the calculator also indicates that it's possible to build a 20k single coil using 44AWG on a 0.5" tall bobbin using a mechanical winder and packing the turns in tightly. And the number of turns are also high (17000+) which will give a higher output than the stock single coil option.

As mentioned in your other thread, a higher number of turns with finer wire will get you there (ignoring the practicalities of working with such fine wire). But higher resistance has counter-effects on the sound. Resistance isn't the be-all measurement of a pickup's output. Is a single-sized mini humbucker off the cards for your customer (eg, Hotrails)? A hot P90 can be in the low-10k's for resistance, but by all accounts they're quite dark sounding. Using your calculator I can get 44AWG to fit in a 0.436" tall bobbin targeting 10K using their 'Strat 1967' menu option. Takes nearly 9000 turns to get there though. Probably something for a mechanical winder only.

50AWG is super fine stuff. Half the diameter of 44AWG, which is generally considered the de facto wire size for overwound pickups. Your chances of breaking it while winding are pretty high. Small wire might yield more turns per bobbin resulting in a hotter output, but it will be at the expense of higher resistance and inter-winding capacitance, which results in loss of highs and higher loading effects from the downstream circuitry (eg, volume/tone pots, the amp input etc). You sure you want to do a pickup with such fine windings? Anything smaller than about 45AWG starts to get a bit esoteric and hard to find. You won't get it from any pickup suppliers. You'll have to extend your search to specialty coil winding suppliers. Doing a search for '<insert AWG here> enamel copper wire' will yield results on Google, but be prepared for the the prices to match the rarity of such a product.

Thanks for your kind words. Having received some notifications of replies in this thread has reminded me that I never took finished pics if the end result. I must remedy this. In response to your query, it's hard to say how the sound changed after all this work. The guitar was in pieces for several weeks and I never made before/after recordings of it, so my memory of how it used to sound is unreliable. However at a pinch I'd say that it is a bit more 'polite' and restrained than it used to be. This appears to be consistent with other people's experience with fitting a Bridge Doctor to their acoustic instruments. The extra mass and stiffness in the soundboard around the bridge area probably dampens the guitar and reduces responsiveness. That said, it doesn't sound bad or wrong per se. Just a little more subdued (if my memory is to be trusted). It's certainly a lot easier to play, although the tuners are still rubbish. I may revisit them with higher quality units in the future, but for now I'm just satisfied that the guitar is actually playable.

Probably the more critical question that should be addressed is whether your neck needs reinforcement in the first place. I personally wouldn't add anything extra if the materials used or the stresses they'll be under don't require additional reinforcement. If you're making your neck from good quality, strong, stable materials and not subjecting them to unusual loads there shouldn't be a structural reason to add carbon fibre rods. That can apply to multi-lamination necks too. Having gone through a phase of installing carbon fibre in necks that probably didn't need it, I actually found them counter-productive. In those necks they made the process of adjusting the trussrod to get the neck to provide some degree of relief for playability nearly impossible. The necks were simply too stiff. If you feel you do want to experiment with it though, the key thing to look for in a reinforcement material is finding something that has more bend resistance in the same direction as the material you're removing from the neck to replace it with. Maybe some aluminium U channel from the hardware store, or two aluminium strips inserted either side of the truss rod with the skinny edges facing up? If the reinforcement material is lighter than the wood it's replacing it also makes sense, which is why carbon fibre is a popular material to use. Maybe you could go to a waste recovery centre or thrift shop and see if anyone has thrown away an old kite/RC helicopter/tent that you can harvest the carbon struts from?

It depends. I think if someone is of the view that their product is entirely unique and worth protecting, they're entirely within their rights to hold it back. On the other hand if they feel their product needs to be public and should be free to share to all (or at least perhaps they aren't bothered if it is out in the open), they're also well within their rights to open it up to the everyone. If we're talking specifically about what goes on at this site, I suspect that the vast majority of us are only hobbyists and are building our instruments for the experience rather than to establish a unique product line that should be protected. To that end I think it's great that those that do come here share their journey with us. From what I've seen over the years, generally what happens is that those builders who take the next step and advance their hobby into a business will tend to spend less time here. That may be due to them protecting their ideas and limiting what they share, but more it's likely is that they simply don't have the time to do so anymore as their hobby transitions to a full-time income. The chances of someone sharing an idea here at ProjectGuitar that becomes public and then widely copied are vanishingly tiny. The market is already well-established elsewhere. The only one I can think of is Ola Strandberg, who developed his Boden headless guitars while he was still a member here. Initially he made the design open source with a Share-and-Share-Alike license. It wasn't until later that the cheap Chinese clones started appearing on Aliexpress, but whether that started happening while he had the design free on his website, or after he advanced to a full-on commercial operation and locked it down, I don't know.

The more I look at this, the more I think it will end up as a prop in the new Furiosa movie

I've seen a couple of ways to do it. One of which was hosted here on the old ProjectGuitar.com website (Wayback Machine to the rescue!): Project Guitar :: Do-it-Yourself Lions Claw (Jem Style Trem Cavity) (archive.org) It's very much a manual operation though, which may appeal if you're limited with tools or experience? A ramp won't give you the curve at the bottom of each channel. What's really needed is some kind of cradle to swing the router from horizontal to vertical, or to lift the router upwards in an arc as it exits the channel. The jig would be fairly complex to do for a one-off. Maybe this as an inspiration?: demo of the JEM floydrose lionclaw router jig i made - YouTube To the best of my knowledge the Jem was never manufactured without the lion's claw trem cavity. You might be thinking of the RG, which was based on the Jem.

The principle is the same - route out the unwanted cavity oversize, plug with a wooden block, plane flush to the original height of the surrounding timber and re-route your required new shape.

Adding a pot by itself won't alter the hum; you have something more fundamental going on that is causing the issue. If you can post some pics of the wiring it would help us to diagnose the issue. A no-pot wiring scheme should be as simple as connecting the hot output of the pickup directly to the tip connection of the jack, and the ground output of the pickup directly to the sleeve connection of the output jack. The bridge ground would also be wired to the output jack sleeve connection.

'Chewy' is a good term. In the example you provide it has an almost onomatopoeic quality - if you accent the 'CHE-' component of the word 'chewy' it works well. Other words that might be applicable could be 'crunchy' or 'gritty', but I guess different people will hear different things and describe it in their own ways.

Doesn't remind me of anything as such - looks quite original and unique - but if this is your intended headstock design and layout don't forget to consider the practicalities of it. I suspect that the G string will struggle to get past the B string tuning post after leaving the nut if travelling in a straight line (B vs E might be a problem too), and that you might get a few skinned knuckles twisting the B string tuning button.

Both pickup's ground wires have a connection to your wiring harness ground? You're using two pickups from different manufacturers; there's no guarantee they're wound with the same phase relationship. Maybe try reversing the phase of one of the pickups by swapping the hot/ground wires of one pickup?

A couple of ways: 1 Cut as close as you can to the intended edges and finish off with some kind of straightedge used as a routing template with a flush-cut bit in the router table. Note, you'll get best results if your routing direction is always 'downhill' with the grain. This will necessitate flipping the fretboard upside down, having the template underneath for one of the two edges and having two flush-cut router bits - one with a bearing above and one with a bearing below the cutters. 2. Cut as close as you can to the intended edges and carefully finish off with a belt sander or some other long, flat surface with sandpaper attached. This is the least risky method of the two but is more laborious and entirely reliant on your eyes to determine when you've got the shape you're after.

It's not clear from your wiring diagram what you're wanting to achieve with the various functions of each switch. Can you describe what each switch does? There are some unusual implementations of the wiring in regards to the pickups too. For example, your diagram shows multiple wires leaving the same point on the pickups; in reality you'd only have one wire per pickup connection and split off multiple connection points at their destination rather than their source. The ground connection via a cap and then through the lower-left pot and 3-way switch is also ambiguous and may not work as you expect.

Taper your fretboard first before gluing. You can then use the attached fretboard as a cutting/routing template for the neck so it can be flush cut to match the fretboard edges.

The normal method is to plan (and perhaps partially build) the neck and use the nominal scale length from that neck to determine where the bridge sits on the body once the neck is in position. Working in the opposite order (ie, randomly attach a bridge to a body and then marry it to an unknown neck) probably won't guarantee success. Scale length is primarily determined by taking the nut-to-12th fret distance and doubling it. In your example a 26" scale neck means that the nut-to-12th distance is 13", and the bridge (actually the point at which the strings leave the saddle, ignoring intonation compensation) is positioned 26" away from the nut of that particular neck. The position of the bridge can not be compromised if you want the instrument to play in tune and intonate correctly. For this reason it's probably not hard to see why just bolting any old neck to any old body may not result in a working guitar, even if they happen to mechanically fit together nicely. You either buy all the parts from a single manufacturer who go out of their way to ensure part A works with part B (eg Warmoth, Fender, Mighty Mite etc), or buy parts from wherever you like and modify the body to match the neck yourself. If you're really lucky you might find that a body and neck from two unrelated manufacturers matches closely enough to just bolt together and work, but I wouldn't count on it. Same goes for other mission-critical things like pre-routed trem cavities, nut widths.

Not sure what the issue is - hard to see? How does the gap look from either side? You could always just overhang the headstock piece a fraction higher up the 'slope' of the neck piece to ensure you have complete coverage of the two faces where they meet, and then just plane/sand the slight overhang back down to match the neck surface, In all likelihood, most builders would fine tune this kind of joint after gluing anyway to ensure the full length of the neck, including the headstock scarf section, was perfectly flat and level before adding the fretboard. At the very least you'll probably have some glue squeeze-out along the join that would still need cleaning up before proceeding any further.

When I was doing the Yamaha FG 12 string refurb I found that the round rat tail file I had on hand had a taper that was a very close match to my bridge pins. By inserting the end of it into the bridge holes and spinning it backwards (as if trying to unscrew it) while keeping modest downward pressure on it the teeth on the file would ream the holes to match the taper of the pins. Maybe take a couple of bridge pins with you to the hardware store and eyeball them against some of their rat tail files and pick one that matches closely.

Good to know . Yes - I was aware of premade locating pins for this kind of thing. My original idea of using bits as locating pins was to use old, broken ones and insert them backwards (ie, shank down). As a fellow amateur computerised wood dust generator, like me you've probably destroyed plenty of bits on your way to learning the ropes on the machine. A 1/8" shank bit in a 1/8" hole has no wobble, and it doesn't mater that the bit is broken - you can be as rough as you like putting them in or out of the holes if the cutting edges are already no good.

Then the narrowest spacing between any two traces you can achieve is .o177". You'd have to check if that would be acceptable for things like DIP packages, where the pads sit on 0.1" centres. Might work? I never had much success with my usual doublesided tape method in the past; if the board was warped it tended to have enough spring to pull itself off the bed partway through the job, which would naturally ruin the PCB. Haven't tried the tape/CA method though. It's hard on the tools. Typically you'd use solid carbide bits which will go the distance in fibreglass but they're more brittle than HSS or steel alloys, so they can break easily. A straight bit will avoid the issue with the PCB artwork growing/shrinking if the board is warped, but they will snap as soon as you look at them if they're asked to go through a high spot in a warped board. That's why most people recommend a vee bit with a shallow tip angle for PCB work. They're much more forgiving to unexpected changes in cutting depth and you can move them faster in the material.

I've done it a few times, but it's a fair bit of hassle to get it to work right. Unless there's a very specific reason why I need to get a one-off PCB made up I normally just get them done by one of the online Chinese PCB vendors like JLCPCB or PCBWay. It might cost more and you end up with multiple boards if you really only wanted one or two, but it takes away all the heartache and stress of trying to do it all yourself. But if you're interested... For really small boards without much detail it can work OK without all the height probing. I've done a couple of pedal-sized boards like this that came out workable in the end, although not perfect. They were double-sided designs so the result was far better than I could have managed using things like Press 'N Peel or photo resist. The problem is that if the blank PCB isn't perfectly flat (and they never are) the routed traces will grow and shrink as the lumps and bumps in workpiece drift closer to or further away from the bit. To combat this try and limit yourself to small designs with generous trace widths so if the routing does get affected by a slightly warped PCB there's still be enough of the circuit left to work with. You may also be able to devise some kind of clamping system that squeezes the four edges of the board tight against your CNC bed which could help reducing any warp in the PCB. For anything bigger than a couple of square inches, you really have no choice but to use height probing and surface mapping. The warp will be too great and you'll risk the artwork fading out completely in the low spots, the PCB traces shrink down to nothing in the high spots, or the tips of the bits get broken if they're pushed through too much high material. Again, I've done it but it's still been a bit hit and miss. Maybe if I did it regularly I'd get more consistent results, but it's such an infrequent thing for me I find I have to relearn everything pretty much from scratch, which invariably results in broken bits or a board that is unusable. The software I've used to do the probing and surface mapping is AutoLeveller, and the PCB artwork I generate using FlatCAM. Both are free. When they work they do work well, but getting them to work in the first place can be a bit of struggle. Note that if you do decide to explore this idea a height probe/tool setter is still an extremely useful addition to your CNC. I added one to mine a few years back and even without doing much PCB work it makes multiple tool changes within a single job soooooooo much easier. You can get away with touching off only once at the start of the job and then just wait as each stage completes to install the next tool, It does the rest automatically without losing tool height, even if the tool length is different each time. Beforehand I was having to split the job into multiple files, one for each tool, and touch off at the start of every file.

I don't think the blender pot will work as you expect it to. If the 3-way toggle switch is set to either both pickups or the P90 by itself the blender pot will affect the level of both pickups at once, acting more like a master volume. I think if you swap the blue and red wires on the blender pot it will fix it. The blender pot is also wired backwards, ie it will reduce the level of the P90 when it's turned clockwise. Maybe this is deliberate? If not just swap the two outer wires on the blender pot. The tone cap is labelled as 233, which isn't a standard value. I assume this is a typo and it should be 223?

What about if you buy a kit guitar and modify it to your requirements? Some of those can be quite reasonably priced. There's also plenty of Youtube vids detailing how to take a cheap kit guitar and pimp it up.

I've got a Weller WES50 soldering station on the bench as the main workhorse. It's probably discontinued now but at the time it was Weller's baseline station. Variable temperature control, rapid heatup time and LED indication of when temperature is reached. More recently I picked up a TS100 portable pocket iron from Aliexpress and have been pleasantly surprised by it. You can get about a dozen different sizes and shapes of tips that snap in to the handle, temp control and tip temp readout built into the handle and just runs off a generic old laptop power supply with a barrel jack. It's pretty normal to be cleaning the tip before each use. Most soldering stations come with a little sponge that you're meant to keep damp and swipe the tip of the hot iron on to keep it fresh and prevent buildup of burnt solder flux. I assume you mean 60/40 tin/lead?Any generic tin/lead blend rosin core solder should do the trick. Avoid the lead-free or silver alloy stuff as it is impossible to work with on big chunky terminations like in a guitar control cavity.