curtisa

On 7/17/2022 at 1:52 PM, FuzzFace said:

Who is the cheapest place to buy bodies and necks predone?

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.

4 hours ago, Crusader said:

I seem to have to clean the tip between every use

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.

4 hours ago, Crusader said:

Solder is 60/40 Alloy 1mm diameter

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.

4 hours ago, FuzzFace said:

I should in theory (just checking) be able to drop a new Gotoh Trem in to replace the Floyd Rose special version

Your best bet is to check the dimension drawings of each and compare the sizes and shapes of each bridge. Floyd Rose publish the dimensions of their bridges on their website.

1 hour ago, FuzzFace said:

How expensive is that tool to take some shavings ?

You mean a plug cutter? You can probably get a decent one for less than $15. Note that you'd also have to have access to a drill press to use one as they can't be used in a hand drill (this might be putting you off even more now )

1 hour ago, FuzzFace said:

I presume there is somewhere you can buy bodies pre routed for a double locking trem etc? But I looked at the price of just necks and you can buy whole guitars for what they want.

The Stratosphere sell Strat-style bodies routed for double locking tremolos, but read the descriptions carefully as they may be routed for official Floyd Rose bridges rather than the Gotoh GE1996. The bridge placement will also be dictated by whatever matching neck is expected to be married to that particular body to maintain proper scale length which might limit your options a bit too.

One-off guitar part purchases are generally more expensive than the equivalent complete guitar; it's just the nature of the beast and the economy of scale. But they do take the headache out of trying to absolutely everything yourself to achieve a customised solution when your budget is constrained or your access to the appropriate tools and skills is limited.

Is it a ledge or a gouge? If it's a ledge you need to get the two surfaces as flat as you can, otherwise you'll struggle to get the two pieces to glue together properly.

A gouge probably won't affect anything structurally, but will present itself as a thick glue line in the scarf once the neck is cut and shaped.

Either way you're better off getting it out.

Not necessarily. The first step is to plan what you can using whatever data you can find about the parts you want to use. Gotoh usually have decent dimension drawings of their products. I think G&L sell their parts to the public - they may be able to provide drawings and measurements if you ask nicely. Use that information to determine how practical it is for you to do the bridge swap first.

41 minutes ago, FuzzFace said:

Yes I was planning to use dowel, should I also put a suger glue or wood glue mix in with the dowel, or just find a dowel slightly larger and hammer that in?

If the new holes overlap the old ones you want to use wood plugs, not dowels. Dowels will have the grain running perpendicular to the grain in the body, which will be near impossible to drill accurately in to and will tend to crush more easily if you try to drive new posts in, which may result in loose or leaning trem posts. Normally you'd use a plug cutting bit and cut a wood plug that has the grain running in the same direction as the wood you're trying to fill. Plug cutters usually only come in a small range of sizes, so you may also have to drill out the old holes oversize to match the plug.

If the new holes don't overlap the old ones you may be able to plug with dowels, but be aware of the added difficulty in hiding the endgrain dowels against the existing surrounding timber (if that's visually important to you).

41 minutes ago, FuzzFace said:

Is this as simple as getting my measure and measuring the length?

Kinda. You need to account for any gain or loss of bridge position relative to the point at which the posts pivot against the knife edges. That can usually only be determined empirically comparing your old bridge and the one you intend to replace it with. Typically you want the saddle breakpoints to sit in the same (ish) positions before and after replacement, and compensate the new post hole positions accordingly.

41 minutes ago, FuzzFace said:

73.025mm. Damn thats close, 1mm is really nothing, I wonder if I try using their posts just to get a gauge, I could then go from there, Not sure if there is a way to borrow 1mm

Be aware that most Floyd-type bridges (and maybe the Gotoh one?) have one of the two knife edges shaped in a semicircle to prevent the bridge from sliding side-to-side and keep it aligned centrally on the body. A 74mm spacing bridge might fit on 73mm post centres, but the semicircular knife edge will pull the bridge across to one side by 0.5mm off centre. This will correspondingly misalign the strings across to one side of the neck by the same amount.

13 minutes ago, FuzzFace said:

Can anyone tell me the following and if most strat dual post trem systems are 74mm apart?

Usually not. Depends on the manufacturer. Most two post trems have the posts almost inline with the outermost strings, which makes them in the order of 52mm or thereabouts. The notable exceptions are Floyd Rose style trems where the posts are typically placed wider than the outermost strings.

16 minutes ago, FuzzFace said:

is there any kind of bog that would fill the old post holes and allow me to drill the correct 74mm apart and put the new posts in from Gotoh?

The normal procedure is to plug the old holes with timber and redrill. I wouldn't use bog or epoxy as they're too unpredictable to use as filler in structurally-critical applications like trem posts - they might dry too brittle or with soft centres.

Don't forget that you may also have to position the Gotoh posts forward or backward from the original post holes to maintain proper bridge placement in relation to the guitar's scale length.

19 minutes ago, FuzzFace said:

does anybody know what distance apart the dual fulcrum posts are?

2 7/8" is what Google suggests, or a whisker over 73mm.

If you leave the width wide you can utilise the excess either side of the neck for useful things like locating pins if you need to.

For example, gluing up the scarf can be a bit tricky as the two surfaces want to slide apart once clamping pressure and wet glue is applied. If you drill a pair of small holes through the two pieces at the outermost edges before gluing up, you can then push some nails through the holes after you apply glue and prevent the two pieces from slipping all over the place.

Lower your blade guides too. You'll get better results if the upper blade guide is only just tall enough to allow the workpiece to pass underneath. You only need to expose as much the blade teeth as is necessary to complete the cut. The more the length of the blade is unsupported the more chance there is for the blade to flex and deflect as the cut is made.

8 hours ago, Yeti said:

The truss rod is dual action and not hard to turn.
There's virtually no relief, when I hold down a string at 12th fret and also at body fret the middle fret is touching the string.

You need more relief. Just to clarify - relief is adding curvature to the neck, not straightening it, which is achieved by loosening the truss rod. This should allow the strings to pull the neck forward to add additional curvature in the neck, thereby adding clearance under the strings to minimise the chance of them striking the frets and buzzing when plucked.

Do not raise the bridge yet. Doing so before addressing the lack of curvature in the neck is only masking the initial problem.

I'd advise against using a zero fret with a lock nut, for the same reason that omitting the string retainer bar behind a locking nut makes it impossible to tune and lock the guitar without the string pitch rising.

If the strings are slightly higher as they enter the string clamps due to the zero fret being higher than the leading edge of the nut, as soon as you tighten the clamps the strings are going to kink down slightly between the zero fret and nut, and rise in pitch. Making the zero fret exactly the same height as the locking nut surface will minimise this effect, but at the expense of inviting nut/string buzz. In this situation trying to get the two components the same height would be as much work as installing the locking nut by itself.

6 hours ago, RVA said:

I think your numbers are all low, except for the 3-way switch - $25?

If @mistermikev has listed prices he's paid or prices as currently quoted (single quantities at retail), I'd say his numbers are bang on. $25 For a Switchcraft toggle is about right, particularly if Switchcraft are struggling, like most other manufacturers, to overcome supply chain issues since the start of the pandemic and the Russian/Ukraine conflict. $24AUD ($18US) was about what I'd pay for a Switchcraft toggle before the world was put on pause. Local prices for me are now $45AUD!

Although I would say $34 for binding and $20 for shielding paint seems a bit of overkill, so who knows 

3 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

I'm just really curious how long it takes me... as for the most part I'm doing one-offs... and this is def NOT the way to do them to make money... nor really is my design... but I'd still like to know the awful truth of how long I actually spend on them.

As would I as well, so I'm curious to see what you get if you decide to record your hours. Like you, I've never worked it out exactly; I've always just assumed it was hovering around the 80-100 hour mark.

38 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

I'm not sure truss rod is the place I want to save $30

I reckon you'd be surprised how prevalent the cheaper rods are in commercial builds. Allied rods are (for me at least) around $80AUD each once I factor in the exchange rate and shipping in one-off quantities. A basic Chinese rod is about $12AUD in single quantities. Even if I buy a bunch of cheap ones, test them all before using and throw away the ones that fail (which I am yet to have one fail...so far...), that makes it a simple choice in my head.

FWIW, I did buy a 3 or 4 Allied rods when the exchange rate was much better some years ago, and one of them gave me grief with rattle after installation which eventually led me to scrap the neck it was in. Maybe I just got unlucky, but 1 in 4 fail rate isn't good for a premium component, and led me to reconsider exactly how important price vs function was to me for a component like that.

46 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

I guess with cnc in the mix it's going to muddy the waters... but also I'd like to know what percentage of my hours is just running the machine vs working the parts/assembly.

If you were to factor in builds that are based off templated designs (either from physical routing templates you've made/bought, or CNC code that you've previously developed), you can increase your speed and cost margins significantly. However if every build you make is a bespoke, one-off custom, that's where the biggest hit to your margins and speed can occur. If you didn't have a CNC you'd be spending time and money making new MDF templates from scratch. If you did have CNC you'd be spending time and money doing all the CAD and CAM from scratch. Naturally in those situations you're going to take longer to build the guitar and (should) increase your sale price to cover the extra cost.

Realistically even if you had perfect CNC code you're still not going to hit 'play' and walk away - you're probably going to keep an eye on the machine and supervise its operation in case something unexpected happens. Your time is still being expended in that case, even if it's just sitting on your bum watching cat videos in the background on Youtube

Don't forget a set of strings.

Tracking your time and money is an interesting exercise. There's probably a 'clock-on/clock-off' app out there somewhere you can stick on your phone that you can smash every time you head in and out of the workshop.

Generally your raw material costs highlight some of the regional differences there can be pursuing this guitar building interest of ours. I couldn't get mahogany, maple or ebony for those kinds of prices down here. Conversely however, I can see some savings I can make against your table - I wouldn't buy an Allied Lutherie truss rod for example, as IME it doesn't give you 8x the performance for 8x the cost of a ordinary double acting rod. I'd also make a scratch plate from a large sheet of raw pickguard material rather than buy a pre-shaped one. 

Tallying labour costs only make sense if you intend to sell the product you're building, otherwise it's more of an academic exercise. But assuming you were interested in tracking it you'd typically set them to something that covers your 'hidden' expenses (power, insurance, heating, website maintenance, advertising, use of the car if you need to go to the shops to make purchases etc) and then apply a fixed factor to allow you to make a profit off your work (2-3x is pretty normal in any industry). Once you start tallying it up it can be quite shocking how much you should actually be charging your finished products out at; you might find that the $810 guitar you built should probably be sold at $3-4k.  

Might be a silly question, but do you know for sure if you need to ground the strings? Depending on your preamp/pickup choice you might find that adding a string ground for noise suppression makes no difference to hum levels (think EMGs for example).

5 hours ago, mistermikev said:

option z is I machine my own brass block and put make the holes follow the arc.  I guess it's really only drilling 6 holes... in theory my cnc can do brass... but then have to buy some bits for metal, have to get a coolant pump... not sure I want to go through all that.  

Dry milling aluminium (or aluminum if you prefer) is achievable on CNC, just need to take things slowly and in small bites. The harder grades of aluminium can polish up quite nicely too for an almost chrome look. Brass might be doable in the same way

On face value that sounds a lot like the first diagram shown on the last image (vol/mid/tone). If you substitute the blend pot for the indicated 3-way switch does it look more like how yours is wired?

This website appears to have the best (only?) info out there on the Reflex pickups:

http://spongeoffun.blogspot.com/2011/05/resurrecting-some-reflex-red-pickups.html?m=1

Reading between the lines it sounds like the preamp was just a single function box that worked in any guitar or bass. It looks like it accepts any generic pickup signal and allows you to control volume and mid/high boost. The last diagram on the page is the easiest to read and includes the wire colours and two example applications.

Or the Reflex Red pickup/preamp set maybe?:

https://reverb.com/au/item/4863374-rare-famous-reflex-red-active-pickup-system-for-jazz-bass-80-s

Music man made something called a Reflex Bass. Maybe it's from that?

Could be anything unfortunately. I have a Bartolini wiring kit here that has a similar sized preamp case as yours, but the potting epoxy used is black instead of red and the wiring leaving the box comes out one of the sides instead of the top. Plus it has a sticker on the side identifying it as a Bartolini product.

It's not Ibanez's original wiring harness from the bass itself by any chance?

Is that black electrical tape wrapped around the black rectangular plastic container? What's underneath it?

Fault around the bass tone pot would be the obvious check - open circuit between the bass pot and surrounding components, faulty bass pot itself, caps on the bass circuit have drifted in value or gone open etc

Guitar amp tone circuits are usually pretty easy things to navigate. 90% of the time they're just variants of a design Fender popularised back in the 50s,

It's the sort of thing you could throw together into an Excel spreadsheet if you really wanted. Feed in the thickness of your blank, desired scale length, required headstock length and headstock angle. It does all the heavy lifting for the math and spits back out the position of the scarf cut and a minimum blank length needed to achieve your design, plus any extra tolerances required for things like fretboard overhang, nut shelf, saw blade kerf, wobbly hands etc.