Ooh, I am excited for the Mustang.

Is that the bridge piece I sent you? Or another?

This is the bridge from that wacky Jackson that i am going to turn into some sort of bolt-on LP Jr/Special. I don't remember where i got it, but the mounting studs for it are super tiny compared the normal gibson type(like the one you sent). So, because i intend to replace the bridge with a trem later, i will only have to deal with two 1/8" ish holes.

The bridge you sent me, is actually most likely going to wind up on aforesaid bolty LP.

I did some more shit on the Lowestang, but i have to take pictars of it. I think i know what i am going to do for the switches too.

Ah ok.

It came off an Epi WildKat so it should have been Gibsonish spec. That is why I wondered.

I have had many silly things try to fight me on this guitar yesterday. Lots of shit going wrong from not having the right parts, or from trying to make incompatible parts fit together correctly. Everything that could have gone unsmoothly, decided to do so.

In any case, i have it mostly together, mostly strung, and mostly wired. For the time being anyhow.



That is just another temporary pickguard solution, this time taken from the shattered lid of a big Sterilite storage container. The hacking around the switches is because i failed to adequately prepare for the fact that the plastic was considerably thicker than the formica pickguard i had on there before, in determining the mounting depth of the switches. So rather than having to redo the whole switch mounting setup(which is probably more involved than it needs to be) i decided to just quickly countersink the switch holes enough to allow the buttons to be pressed in all the way.

What i decided to do for the switching is maybe a little ambitious. It is four DPDT pushbutton switches that i gutted out of a broken Crate GX-130C many years back(now that i am less of a noob, i wish that i hadn't torn it apart, so i could fix it and use it, but whatevs).

Basically, each pickup has an on/off. Then the bridge has a phase reversal switch. Then they both are run into a series/parallel switcher.

Now, either, i am not going to be able to do what i want with this setup, or i have made some sort of silly wiring mistake(most likely) because currently, i can only use both pickups on at the same time, and the phase switcher. So i seem to have fucked up the series/parallel arrangement(or that switch might be toast!).

Also, i have to rejigger the bridge some, as it is just the tiniest amount too low. It plays as is, but there is a bit more half fretout action than i want.

All of that said, even with the very limited pickup functionality i have currently, it is pretty cool sounding. Right now i am basically getting one setting that sounds like a slightly more hummy version of the telecaster middle position, and then an interesting quiet humbucking but out of phase kind of oddsound. The humming first position probably has to do with the way the one pickup faces one direction while the other faces the other way. It is not an unbearable hum though, probably less than one single coil would normally be. Innnteresting. I need to get the other positions working though before i decide what i want to do.

That's quite elegant, the many switching options that are made available by four neatly arranged buttons.

It is so pretty...


However, that Crate would have been awesome to have in functioning condition.
It's basically an Ampeg VH140.

It had a blown transformer and no one could tell me what it needed for a replacement part, so i ended up just saying fuggit. Years later, i actually traded the (fucking gigantic) headshell to someone in exchange for some parts that ended up being my first amp build.

These days, i could have pretty easily figured out the transformer specs and probably fixed the thing, but back then there was just no way.

Also, while it was a pretty excellent SS map, the Ampeg is definitely a nicer one. They are similar in a bunch of ways, but the evil sound of the VH140 is moar evil than the evil sound of the GX130C. The cleans might be a little better on the Crate, but maybe not, depends on what you are in to.

Given the choice though, i would definitely go VH140 over the Crate.

The best thing ever though, would be if Ampeg reissued that thing in a small/normal sized package. There really doesn't seem to be any reason whatsoever for those maps to be in such oversized boxes.

Yesssss. I have just vanquished the (three separate!) electrical troublepoints and now everything works correctly.

The problem turned out to be caused by my really-almost-completely-destroyed Weller soldering iron making a fucking mess of shit and plarping solder all over everything making minibridges and shorts. The iron broke a while back in a way that made it so i can no longer replace the tips when they get beat. The tip that is stuck in there right now is sooooooooooo fucked up. I keep on filing/sanding/steelwooling it down to a smooth point so it will go another day, but i fear that the sharpening i just finished will be the last one. It is now like one of those stubby pencils from a miniature golf course or bowling alley. I will have to replacify it.

But in its newly cleaned-up state, i was able to make some actual proper joints and get all of the switches working right.

These pickups are pretty hot for SCs, and they like to hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. All of the switching positions that use both pickups have a funny quackiness to them. Not out of phase, but rather out of polarity, due to the way the pickups are mounted in the body, one forward, one backward.

Lots of interesting sounds innit.

There is so much shit with the switches and their wires though, i had to widen the control cavity from the stock fender style to get it all in there yesterday. Now that i have had the pickguard off and on a few more times since then, i have decided i have to make it even bigger. Just cramming everything in the body is a huge fucking pain. When i take it apart later(maybe much later) to paint it or whatever, i will probably give it some sort of near-swimmingpool routing in there.

Oh I like that.

I am wondering if some of my problems with wiring and such come from my Weller needing a new tip?

I am pretty sure it is far far past its point of usefulness. The gold course pencil comparison is actually pretty accurate to how mine is looking.

The tip should be totally smooth, should tin totally consistently with no voids or bits of metal that solder won't stick to, and should be roughly whatever shape it began as. For a basic Weller this is usually sort of a rounded chisel/wedge shape.

If the metal has started to become pitted at all, you should replace it. When i am building a lot of stuff all the time, i may go through a tip every six months to a year? They last longer if you take good care to keep them clean and tinned at all times. When i start building all the time though, i tend to get slightly less anal about that, so i start to wear them down.

It is verrrrrrrrrrrrrry old and used pretty heavily. It probably needs a new tip.

Solder got sticky on it and it tends to splatter.

If it is smooth, you can bring it back with a little fine steel wool. If it is rough or pitted at all, just dump it.

I have decided that when i do take the Lowestang apart to paint it, i am going to route it so that i can flip the bridge pickup 180º and put it back into correct polarity. The out-of-polarity thing is an interesting sound, but after messing with it for a bit, i don't think it is one that am really going to use much.

The series/parallel shit on the other hand is supersweet.

I have just returned from Kinkos with the raw materials:



Now to the batcave with the Krylon Crystal Clear and the Super 77.

I might do the numbers a bit differently. The first batch was just a test. They are magnetic, but not as cleanly done as i would like(my exacto knife craft has suffered greatly in the years since i left art school... ). I printed out a couple of sheets of numbers to try other techniques wif.

awesum chris.

It should say "we have gone 364 days without a turkey fire" on the guitar body.

I could totally clearcoat one of the prints into the back of the thing. Hmm. Next white guitar perhaps.

You definitely should.

So all of Dev's speak of shredguitars has me looking abouts the internets at various shredguitars i cannot afford. Now the upside is that i discovered that there is a Music Go Round barely 20 minutes from my house, and browsing their store online it looks like they have lots of nifty used shit. The downside of course, is that i will not go there, being that i kenna afford anything, even on the cheepest of cheeps.

Anyhow, besides that, it all reminded me of the fact that i *almost* have a shredguitar here already:

(this isn't my guitar, but it is exactly what mine looked like when it was new)


My very first guitar, that my parents bought me for xmas, somewhere in the early nineties. The Charvette was the Korean budgetbrand for Charvel at the time. Actually, initially they were the Japanese budget brand but about halfway through they switched them to Korea, plywood bodies and all that biz.

Mine is solid wood, basswood. They had a goofy single locking jackson-branded floyd rose licensed trem that kind of sucked for staying in tune, and uses no parts at all from any of the "real" floyd rose systems. And that used totally different body routes and mounting points/widths.

Anyhow, it was my first guitar, and i was an asshole. So, over the years i fucked with so many different aspects of it, that i basically destroyed it:



This was years later after i tried to patch it back together enough to use. As you can see, at some point i took a chisel to the bridge pickup cavity to fit a very lousy, very wide Harmony P90-esque single coil into it. It sounded so terrible that it only stayed in the guitar for about ten minutes. The chisel damage, well that stayed a bit longer.

I also, in attempt to achieve better tuning stability, replaced the Jackson Ghetto Floyd with this traditional strat-esque Wilkinson trem(which i actually removed from another horrible abortion of a mod project guitar, my Jackson JJ1). The Wilkinson was almost as bad an idea as the Harmonypickup/chiselparty. The mounting points were different so i had to dowel and redrill the studs for it. But i did not have anything like the right tools for the job, and then i missed by enough that the guitar would never again be intonated any where near correctly.

Still, it has the finest and thinnest neck of any guitar i own. It actually has a nice mild bit of birdseye to its maple.

Anyhow, my plan was always to buy a new body and a decent Floyd Rose and bring the neck back to life in something day glo and hairspray-friendly.

Well, i cannot really afford to do that, but it also occurred to me that i would be a little sad to see the old body just not attached to anything ever again.

So i decided to make a last ditch effort to get the body back into usable shape for a future shredguitar.

Well, this is what i have to work with, anyhow:



You can see the multiple horrors of the tremolo install and the chiselparty. Basically, if i want to put a standard Floyd in there, the hole through the body needs to be half as wide, it needs a big routed indent behind it, and i need to figure out how to get yet another pair of bridge studs into that heavily abused and overly drilled/redrilled section in between the through hole and the bridge pickup.

Then of course, i have to figure a way to hide the shame of The Chisel Party.

I should note that i am 173% anti pickguard on shredguitars. So i will need to do something else.
































Anyhow.


After arguing with this and drawing shapes on top of it with a china pencil for the last couple of days, i finally just kind of said "fuck it." and then today i did this:



























I wish i had photographed the Truly Massive Gigantic Hole that i routed out of the thing, but you can infer from the block sitting there what that was all about.

I was going to go with a large piece of maple i have lying around for the plug, but in the end decided to try to go with a similarly lightweight wood to the basswood, hoping for whatever resonant consistency i can possibly retain, after cutting such a massivebig hole out(it is about the depth of the pickups, slightly deeper, and as big as the block looks).

The solution was of course: cheepo pine from the board i made the Lowestang from. I have some concerns about it for this porpoise, but figure if all hell breaks loose, i can always just route the fucking thing out again and try something else.

Anyhow, now i have to wait for the glue to dry. But in theory, this solution will allow me to basically start from scratch with drilling new trem posts, and doing the correct routes for whatever Floydtrem i wind up acquiring for it.

Now i have to figure out how to acquire said Floydtrem. Maybe one of those GFS "fastloader" ones. Still need to figure out how to put $70 towards it, but whatever. I have a bit of stuff to do before i get to that stage.