curtisa

I've never done a set neck, but I suspect those in the know are going to recommend it would be better to build it to take advantage of a longer tenon, and thus more surface area for the glue joint to establish strength where it's needed.

Pickup cavities next. Template is oversized because I use the pattern ring on the router with a 1/4" diameter bit to keep all the corner radii nice and tight: Hog out the excess (carefully!) with the trimmer fitted with a 3/8" bit (don't worry if it looks a bit rough at this stage), then follow up with the big router with the 1/4" bit and pattern ring: Then for the sneaky bit to create the extra depth for the pickup ears: Perfect fit: Bridge pickup is a repeat of the neck: Checking for bridge location with a couple of pieces of black cotton. The bridge will need to be recessed about 1.5mm to compensate for the slightly beefy baseplate this thing has:

It's very nearly, Scott. For sixty bucks (maybe $50US or 45EUR...or a handfull of soggy Engish chips) I reckon it's pretty good value. Time for neck to meet body: A bit of tape either side to ensure the neck is a super snug fit: Dry fit test:

In build threads, no one can hear you scream.

Possibly bending the rules a little bit, but in keeping with the budget (ish) nature of this build this figured Tas Blackwood top only set me back sixty smackers. As a bonus it came with an extra piece big enough to be a headstock veneer. If only I had a headstock... Don't forget that there's a lot of chambering going on in there, so the lack of much in the way of clamping cauls is deliberate:

Seems Andy's threads are destined to devolve into a quagmire of humour and derailment. Oh well. Best not mess with the formula then:

@a2k - I misread your initial post regarding the pickups. It appears you're already planning for a twin humbucker guitar. The SRV single coil comparisons add an extra layer to your search criteria, so you also need to look out for humbuckers that sound good when split. A split humbucker won't sound exactly like a true single (it can't - the construction methods and materials used are too dissimilar), but it will impart most of a single coil's characteristics to get by with.

Nothing worse than dinting your flip.

Duane Allman's work I'm not overly familiar with, so I'd be heading to Youtube to find some examples (Les Pauls I guess?). SRV you'd typically associate with Strats, particularly the neck single coil and neck+middle single coil combos. So perhaps whatever sounds you're looking for it will be a bridge humbucker with a single coil neck? Or maybe hum-single-single configuration? Edit: just done some interwebs trawling - seems that Duane Allman was primarily associated with Les Pauls. His death largely pre-dates the aftermarket pickup industry, so anything he was using at the time was likely fitted with stock pickups. So perhaps you can focus on something advertising as faithful to a vintage PAF humbucker for a pickup?

Yikes, where do you start? Arguably the pickups will be the principle component in defining the guitar's sound (other than what you're plugging it into). Picking one will be difficult unless you're willing to take a punt or know exactly what you're shooting for. Everyone's perception of sound will be different. You might say "distinct". Somebody else might say "bright", "defined", "harsh", "brittle", "open"...or perhaps just distinctly different to anything else? Maybe a good start is searching for recorded examples of guitar sounds and finding out what pickups were used, then work onwards from there. Mostly no different to the options available for basses. Actives (EMG, Seymour Duncan Blackout, Fishman Fluence etc) usually all ship with the pots, as the lower resistance requirements tend to be a bit unique, or the active kit is being used to retrofit a passive guitar. 25k is typical Passives expect higher resistance pots, generally 250k or 500k. General rule of thumb is 250k for single coils or humbuckers where a slightly darker tone is desirable. 500k for humbuckers or single coils where a brighter tone than normal is required. A switch is a switch is a switch. Actives or passives don't care. The question is more what do you want the switch to do, what you're preferred look is and how much extra you're willing to spend in the name of quality and ruggedness.

Fret spacing is determined by the twelfth root of two (roughly 1.059), That is, each fret will be closer to the next as you go up the fretboard by a factor of 1.059. For example, if you had a scale length of 25" and you knew the distance from the nut to the first fret was 1.403" (lots of fretboard calculators out there in Googleland), the distance from fret 1 to fret 2 would be 1.403/1.059 = 1.3248". The distance from fret 2 to fret 3 would be 1.3248/1.059 = 1.251", and so on... To go backwards from the nut to a negative value would mean taking the distance of the nut to the first fret and multiplying by 1.059. So nut to fret -1 would be 1.403 x 1.059 = 1.4858". Fret -1 to Fret -2 would be 1.4858 x 1.059 = 1.573".

Sounds like a helluva shindig at your place. Can't say mine was much more lively. Couple of drinks, game of Scrabble, in bed by 11pm. Real party animal, me....

Yes, this has/is already been discussed over at the Off Topics area:

Sustainiac claim 20-50 hours of operation from a single 9V alkaline battery in thier FAQ. Note that's not running time, merely if you forget to switch the unit off. It could be less if you want to use the thing properly. Their other claim for improving battery life is to redesign the driver amp to use "a digital power amplifier that was four (4!) times as efficient as a conventional power amplifier". What they're really trying to say is that they've dispensed with linear power amps (LM386 and others similar chips) and used a class D switching device instead to maximise battery life. The same technology that is utilised in just about any small format audio device that runs on batteries these days. Really, this is one of the key areas where the DIY sustainer should have made inroads. The trouble is that many DIY-ers wanting to try this out were hamstrung either by the fact that building a class D amp using off the shelf components increases the complexity beyond what they were willing or able to do, or having to resort to a self-contained class D chip amp which 99% of the time are only offered in ultra-tiny surface mount packages, again making it difficult for the bedroom builder to put together. The LM386 option persists because it's easy, not because it's the best.

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

Never seen a switch like that before, but judging from the pics it looks like you've wired it correctly anyway. Looks a lot like a standard 2 pole/3 position switch like this, but the two middle lugs (the two common terminals) are pre-cofigured on yours to a single point in the middle of the switch. Assuming the wiring codes for your pickups are for Dimarzio, the greens of both pickups go to the nearest ground point, most probably the back of the volume pot. The braids (if any) from each pickup also need to be connected to ground. The rest you have correct - black/white from each pickup joined and insulated, red to each side of the switch.

Moved to the Tech Area -> Electronics Chat

Wire your kill switch to the pale wire (grey? white?) -the top lug - and the middle black wire -the middle lug - and you'll be grand.

Depends a bit on your output jack construction. If you cn post a photo we can probably identify it for you. That scheme will work perfectly OK with actives. Alternatively you can wire the killswitch across the volume pot - one lead to the volume pot case the other to the wire that's marked as red ("From Switch") in your diagram. It does the same thing, and may be easier to wire up in your case rather than fluffing around with the output jack.

OK, so I stand corrected - I just dug out some of my old notes on the subject and found a bunch of photos that somebody took of an autopsy of an old Sustainiac Stealth driver. The two coils measure 6.2 ohms each, each coil connected in parallel. That would indicate each coil is likely 8 ohms AC impedance. In parallel that's 4 ohms. So the implication is that current (brute force) is more important in getting the strings moving. There's nothing super-interesting about the construction of the driver, other than it's physically taller than PSWs (about the same as any single coil pickup), uses two laminated cores rather than a single solid core and probably uses thicker wire wound more times. Note also that the Sustainiac Stealth has since been replaced by the Sustainiac Pro (no idea what the differences are), and I have never seen details on the Fernandes driver.

Cheers Scott, I've made it kicking and screaming to 2017. Hope your new years celebrations don't take too much out of you too.

Yep. He's also wound the two driver coils in opposite phase. This is mentioned in at least one patent on the subject of sustainers as a means of cancelling the emitted magnetic field of the driver to minimise the effect of induced noise in adjacent pickups Yes, although technology has moved on a long way from the LM386. I suspect it was originally used by PSW as it was easy for him to get cheaply and didn't require much electronics knowledge to get it working on a 9V battery. The fact that nearly every design he proposed was pretty much lifted off the LM386 datasheet (the Fetzer Ruby too) suggests as much. There are far better ways of doing it now. The fact that none of the commerical sustainers use (or ever used) the LM386 should be the first indicator that it was never the best solution. The Ebow is the only exception, and all the DIY sustainers based on the same circuitry performed no better than this. There must be, and I'm surprised that after all that time the defacto 'standard' by PSW was always 0.2mm enamel copper wire, 8 ohms impedance, wound as shallow as possible (3-4mm high was typical IIRC). None of the commercial offerings use this format and I refuse to believe that their R&D somehow overlooked coils of similar spec to PSWs. Magnetic circuit theory dictates that more turns of wire will give a stronger electromagnetic field, which goes hand in hand with creating an efficient driver, particularly when operating from an amp running on a battery where long running time is important. I wouldn't be surprised if the Fernandes and Sustainiac units are more like 100-300 ohms impedance, particularly seeing as the driver also doubles as the neck pickup when the sustainer is switched off.

Possibly the biggest hurdle to overcome was having a base design that worked for everyone. The unfortunate thing about PSWs work was that over the duration of nearly 7 years that the monster thread ran, the best and only recommendations was the F-R circuit and the 8 ohm driver, both very much guerilla solutions. I did actually chat with Pete privately via email a few times. He was a quite a nice chap away from the hussle and bustle of the various message boards he was participating in, but very much an 'ideas man'.

From what I gather he's treating the driver as a split system, in the same way a two-way speaker uses a woofer to reproduce bass sounds and a tweeter for the treble. Each driver covers three strings and is fed a portion of the input signal tailored to the frequency range of each group of three strings. But he's not changing the construction of each driver to be more efficient at bass and treble ranges, so it's unclear whether this will have much of an impact on the scheme. Nearly every DIY sustainer I've seen has always been a variation on the Fetzer-Ruby schematic. The Kemo amp just substitutes the LM386 for something with more grunt. A bigger hammer to drive the nail in, so to speak. As good as PSWs intentions were, he lacked the technical understanding to fully explain why he did things the way he did, preferring to simply stab in the dark until something worked, and then advising people to reproduce his method to get the same results. In reality the Fetzer-Ruby (and derivatives) is woefully inadequate for the task, building the driver coil gave inconsistent results for everyone and no real work was ever put into addressing the shortfalls of the whole system. The added distraction was that PSW would tend to go off on wild tangents and long-winded posts that further clouded the development of the sustainer - too much talk, not enough action. Most people who were interested in building their own sustainer simply wanted a verified, known-good set of instructions for building the driver coil, and a schematic for the associated circuitry that would at least give predictable results in most circumstances. PSWs idea was to encourage experimentation using the basic 8ohm coil and Fetzer-Ruby schematic as a starting point. It was inevitable that the disparity between the two ideals would lead to poor results and frustration for many.

Sounds a lot like what Charlie Hunter does, although his instruments are 7 and 8 string multiscale, where there's more 'real estate' to fit the big jumps in string pitches/tension between the bass and treble. Tension of the bass strings on a Telecaster will be the least of your worries. Assuming a 0.095" bass E, tension over the shorther scale length an octave down is about the same as a 0.046" tuned to normal pitch. Ignoring the practicalities of fitting a bass E and A on a Telecaster, the real problem is going to be the strings tone and intonation accuracy over the shorter scale length due to the reduced tension. What about employing a hybrid tuning system to make the leap between treble and bass a little less severe? As an idea take your Fender Bass IV and tune the low E and A as per normal (octave down), and instead of stringing D/G/B/E for the upper four, shift it down to A/D/G/B or A/D/F#/B.