curtisa

I had seen a similar bare wire method elsewhere, where the wire is laced under the saddles, but I felt it was a bit rough around the edges to look at...Not that you can see it once the saddles are screwed down.

What about coming from the other direction - drill from the toggle switch cavity to the pickup cavity?

For the last two multiscale builds I used EMGs pickups. Low impedance active pickups negate the need to ground the strings to reduce noise, so I simply omitted grounding the saddles. This time round I'm installing Lace Alumitones which do need the strings grounded. Grounding a standard bridge with a metal baseplate is easy, where any contact point on the bridge automatically conducts through to all six strings by virtue of all metal components being in contact with each other. Grounding the strings on these multiscales presents a challenge in that each saddle must be grounded separately. Here's yet another anally-retentive solution: First coat of oil on the body. Going to be redder than I expected:

Bonus points to be awarded if you can make a feature of permanently installing that Lego block

Don't see why not. As long as the measurements are verified you should be good to create your own set of templates from there. Nothing special about making the templates, just lots of patience trying to line things up before cutting. Anything that needs a straight edge was cut with a router fitted with a pattern-following bit riding on a square piece of plastic or MDF. From memory the only pieces that were hand cut were the outside edges of the insert plate that goes into the master indexer and the little stop bar that is used to route the well for the tail of the Floyd to allow trem upswings. If this is your first attempt at making templates like this use MDF if you can. Perspex can be tricky to cut with a router, and is more expensive to replace if you mess up creating a template. The only real advantage pespex has over MDF for this kind of thing is it will wear longer (how many Floyds are you really going to install?), and it's handy to be able to see through the indexing plate to line up on a centreline.

Plastic supply wholesaler? Model-making supply store? Epoxy can be dyed to all sorts of different colours with powders and dyes. Maybe set up some kind of formwork around the area that needs binding, like a concreter pouring kerbs, and pour tinted epoxy in?

19mm aint crazy skinny. C'mon, be a real man! Ibanez Wizard necks went down to 17mm

Cut the neck and bridge pickup routes first and then carefully drill at an angle from between each cavity, taking care not to let the angled drill bit gouge the top edge of the route. You can then 'leapfrog' your way from one end of the guitar to the other via each pickup route without having to drill more than about 2 inches.

Attempt number 3: Better than the last two attempts. Still not wonderful, but I think I could live with it. Probably the worst of it is where the taper of the replacement piece runs out and the faint glue line is visible, but that will probably always be a problem no matter how well the patch matches the surrounding grain.

Yep, the radius beam will take the edges of the frets down ever so slightly, but the excess material removed is so miniscule it's not worth worrying about too much. I guess if I was using a really small radius fretboard to start with or really low frets I'd probably use a flat beam instead. It'll be the colour of the chip that gives me the most grief with a fix like this. As you say, I can always fake the grain lines at the point where the two differing timbers meet. I use 1" wide tape for the fretwork. On the lower frets I just lay two pieces overlapping each other flush up against the side of each fret. As the gaps get narrower I just use one piece, push down the excess into the adjacent fret with my fingernail and gently slice off the excess with a sharp scalpel under the fret. As you go further up the board the offcut of tape starts becoming wide enough to be used on the upper frets too, so it gets repurposed as well.

Got lots of scrap. Got lots of time to have another go. Will probably give it another shot yet before breaking out the airbrush. Just need to put it to one side for now before I get too shirty over the whole thing and throw a chair. Don't think this build is sufficiently 80s enough to withstand the onslaught of neon green.

That'd be an easy solution. But no, I refuse to let this thing beat me. It will live, whether it wants to or not. Besides, I've got other project ideas I want to start, and I don't want to do that without finishing a current one.

In the meantime spent the remainder of the afternoon doing the fretwork on Evil Twin: 16" Radius beam gets 400 grit paper stuck on and then the neck gets levelled on the beam: Check progress as we go to see when all high spots are knocked off: Then crowning and polishing:

Second attempt. This time remembered to align the grain direction with the angle of the top surface: Nope. Still not going to work. Grain direction is right, but the colour is too obvious: Putting this one aside for now to mull it over. I'm thinking the grain on the blackwood is too open to match with a small chip without standing out too much. I might have to resort to some kind of black burst on the back of the body to disguise the repair.

Good grief. The curse of the Evil Twin strikes again. This one just doesn't want to go quietly. Rounding over the back of the body with a 3mm radius bearing bit and managed to forget that the location of the jack hole is in the line of fire of the bearing: Can't reshape the body outline as the binding is all on. Can't thin down the back of the body ans the jack socket recess will be too close to the rear of the body. So I figured what would @ScottR do in a situation like this? Decided to bite the bullet and attempt a chip replacement on the damaged spot: Not going to work. The grain direction in the replacement piece goes up at an angle and will stand out too much:

I suspect that most builders here are using off-the-shelf components. Perhaps the only difference is that they have found different shelves to the rest of us. From recent memory I've seen members make their own control knobs out of turned pieces of timber, or timber shrouds for pickups, or epoxy-pot their own pickups. At the other end of the spectrum, Ola Strandberg developed his own headless bridge hardware and shared progress here while he was still a member. True custom made hardware in small quantities is likely to be extremely expensive. Self-made stuff that could be sold to other members is entirely down to the discretion of the builder - what to charge (case of beer, several thousand bucks)? What's being made (six tuning buttons, 11 string double-locking tremolo)? How long will it take (2 days, 10 months)? Might also depend a bit on how 'custom' you want the parts to be. Many firms will do lesser-known finishes to their standard product lines (copper plate, brushed chrome, brushed steel etc) if you ask them.

Cut a piece of 3mm MDF or sheet metal a little wider than your fretboard with a nice straight edge on the longest side. Draw a centre line up the middle parallel to the longest edge. Draw a centre line up the middle of your fretboard. Attach the fretboard to the sheet using double sided tape taking care to line up the centrelines you've drawn on both. The sheet then becomes the register for a right angle for the fret slots.

The extra ground wire you mention is used to minimise any hums and buzzes. The wire attaches to the bridge and forms a conductive path to the strings via the saddles, so that when you touch the strings any residual noise is reduced. Sometimes this wire is direct from the bridge to the main ground location in the guitar (90% of the time, the back of the volume pot). Other times it is just to the nearest ground location, which in a Telecaster is usually the bridge pickup. For quiet operation the bridge should be grounded somehow, somewhere. Not a short, but from your description it does sound like the bridge pickup has been grounded via the tone pot, which is fine in and of itself, but then the tone pot has not been grounded to anything else. The net effect is that the bridge pickup is still ungrounded (and the tone pot probably doesn't work either) and no sound from this pickup is possible. I assume that the middle position on the switch just gives the neck pickup only? This would indicate that the problem is an open circuit (ie, disconnected) bridge pickup rather than a short circuit. Post some pics of your setup - inside the control cavity, back of the pots, pickup wiring. As long as it's nice and clear it should help get things unravelled.

It's been moved to the 'Solid Body and Bass Chat' area. The original location it was posted in (Tutorial and Reference Section) was likely to result in it being overlooked by most members, hence the thread was moved. If you ever need to know what area of the forum you're currently looking at, there is a hierarchical listing at the top of each page that shows you where you are at any given time.

Thread moved to appropriate subforum.