Dub's Wacky Project Guitars Thread--we're baaaaaack

[dubkitty]

as wonderful as it could possibly be. so good that after i got back from jamming in NJ weekend before last i immediately ordered the fitted Guild case. somewhere down the line i want to get a second Aristocrat and fit it with the Guild LB-1 pickups and a Guildsby, both of which they sell on the Guild website. i think i'll call it Mme. Defarge.

[dubkitty]

here's the Jazzmaster after various types of tweaking, adjustment, and replacement of the plastic parts. you can see how much better the tortoise pattern shows up with the lighter parts. i did a mod on the rhythm circuit so it works with all three toggle switch positions. i'm probably going to buy the set of 1965 Jazzmaster knobs, because cool knobs. it's now at the point where i can stop monkeying around with it and start getting to know it. doesn't it look happier now?

before.

after.

[dubkitty]

the bride stripped bare by her batchelors even. the Double Jet has been on hold awaiting yet another small batch of necessary parts, and my hesitance about the hole i drilled for the tone switch. my wonderful girlfriend gave me a Dremel set which will be perfect for fixing the hole...i just have to measure it out meticulously.

i thought of keeping the master volume control that's wired into the harness, but i'm kind of dubious. for one thing, i almost never even use the knobs on a guitar except to turn it off before i set it down. and for another, that would mean drilling another hole in a place that's too far outside the control rout to be easily accessed and prepared. at this point i'm just waiting for the rest of the parts to arrive.

[dubkitty]

so in the meanwhile, feeling too tired to do the filing of the nut and saddle for the Epiphone, i turned to working on my Jazz Bass. it's a MIM fretless of indeterminate age, and acquired a nasty bow in the neck because i was using super-heavy flatwounds...i think the G was .060. so i took the neck off, let the truss rod all the way out, and let it settle for a few days, then tightened it up as far as it would go to try and get things straight, and finally let the truss rod out about 1-1/2 turns, which gives some room to adjust. it's pretty straight now. i ordered LaBella "low tension" flats, which seem like a good compromise between heavier sets and the .040-.090 sets Ernie Ball sells. only 135 lb. of string tension, which really isn't a lot.

the nut was broken and cut way too low, so much so that there are little grooves in front of the nut where the strings were in contact with the fingerboard. happily, Jazz Bass nuts are quick and easy compared to guitar nuts. once i string it up i'll fine-tune the slots. yet again i have to wait for parts...as i was about to string it up i noticed that the bushing was missing from the G-string tuner and since they don't sell individual ones i had to order a new set which allegedly will be here by Saturday.

i swapped the knobs for Fender amp-style knobs. they're far easier to read, and i felt like the bass needed some 1970s ghetto bling. when everything's together it will have the bridge cover and the cover that goes over the neck-ier pickup. i originally put them on trying to recreate the sense memory of the fretless JB i learned on in the City College of SF Jazz Improvisation Workshop, and then discovered that they serve as useful shielding from RF interference with the pickups.

i'm trying to figure out how to make a stand-up extension like the old Gibson EB-2 which had what i always called a "pool cue-stick," a dowel about 12"-16" long that screwed into a thread-tapped strap button. i love to play electric bass vertically, especially fretless...i sometimes use a milk crate. the fingering, sustain, and decay are totally different.

[Dandolin]

ain't the same thing as flats at all - but i rescued a cheapie fretless (Cort Curbow) with tapewounds on it and it made me a believer. Might be a thing to try if the LaBellas are still a bit much for the neck - they a re super low tension, but don't feel as floppy as the lowest gauge standard flatwounds, probs because of the nylon. Tone wise, they are a bit brighter in the high mids/low highs (wat, lol?) area but the nylon kills the really high extension off, so not twangy at all, and the feel is tremendous for fretless.... Also, maybe even moreso than flats, they last a looooong time.

Glad to see there appear to be no stealth projects necessary on your Guild - how's the honeymoon?

[dubkitty]

i haven't been spending as much time with the Guild as i would like...as part of the general guitar renovation i've been going over the other guitars and optimizing them: adjusting the truss rods and action mostly now that the Jazzmaster seems largely sorted. i just lowered the action and backed down the pickups on the Epiphone SG, and it's even better than it was before which is pretty damn great. the neck is as straight as i've ever seen, and it was built in 2004. i've never even taken off the truss rod cover. good Epiphones can be great instruments...for example, i've never played a bad Epi gold-top Les Paul with the P-90s in. if i had to pick one cheap guitar to gig with, that would be it. i'd consider one, but with the Tokai LP Special and the Aristocrat i'm pretty well set for P-90 tones.

with the vintage domed thumbwheels for the ABR-1 the Vibrola works just about as well as 60s versions which is the main drawback to modern Epis/Gibsons with Vibrolas or Bigsbys. the bridge actually rocks slightly on the thumbwheels. i also straightened the neck and adjusted the pickups on the Strat for more sweetness and less bark. at least i have the pickup height set for most of the kids...i really don't want to spend a day on each instrument. despite the slightly iffy intonation, this is why i love the Gretsch "rocking bar bridge"...no intonation adjustments at all.

[dubkitty]

but then, if i hadn't let most of this stuff hang for five years i wouldn't have such a workload. well, at least it keeps me off social media.

[dubkitty]

i started on the Double Jet again on the premise that all the parts had arrived. the first order of business was to finish the hole in the top for the tone switch. as i had feared, the hole migrated to the outside as i tried to ream it out by hand:

i had a go with one of the grinding bits on the Dremel and got it close, but not quite right. followed that up with the 1/2" drill bit and it's ugly, but effective:

see here that the washers are aligned with the general N/S orientation of the guitar:

remember, kids, washers cover a multitude of sins.

having gotten that sorted, of course there was more...

[dubkitty]

projects are currently on hiatus. i discovered that i ordered the wrong wiring harness for the Gretsch and can't afford the postage to send it back till the 15th. i got through the 6-string acoustics. it's really hard to get used to the Epiphone being easy to play...the feel is the same, but i don't have to push as much. i found a PERFECT replacement bridge for the Egmond, a Grover flat-top mandolin bridge which is almost precisely the same size/shape/profile as the cheap plastic bridge that came with the guitar. i'll do pictures when i feel up to it. next goals are to get the rest of the parts for my ES-335 and send them to the luthier in NJ who's doing the work, and replacing the trem on the Jazzmaster as well as swapping the .022 cap on the rhythm circuit for a .01 cap as used on the Jaguar rhythm circuit. the Gretsch will probably get restarted near or after the year's end depending on parts availability and when i feel up to it. there really isn't much else that needs doing on the complete guitars. i hope to get a correct neck for the Hopf, and have a list of stuff to do to the Kondor. more on that later. it's better for me to rest...i got so fried between working during the day and working on guitars in all my spare time that i had two mini-nervous breakdowns during November. i have to learn that i'm not the scrawny little Iron Man i was in my 20s and 30s any more. seriously, guys, the best thing you can possibly do for yourselves is die before you're 50.

[dubkitty]

to be clear, i'm out of the projects business for the foreseeable future. once the Gretsch is done, i have to re-orient my relationship with the guitar from a series of technical questions to something which brings me joy, thanks to folks for their interest.

[Achtane]

Aw
I've enjoyed reading the guitar blog even though I'm shit at feedback.

[dubkitty]

thought this was a good time to revive this thread because i'm working on stuff again. i started out by making the Kondor playable...i'd fucked up the nut when i last worked on it and didn't want to deal with it for a couple of years. i got a Tusq nut for Gibsons off of Sweetwater that had good string spacing for the Hondo neck and only needed to be sanded down at the base for height and have a bit of overhang lopped off the treble side. once that was sorted i went ahead setting it up, and it plays surprisingly well though the neck could be described as a very wide D shape. the term "baseball bat" springs to mind. i'd been using fairly heavy strings because they were what i had in the house when working on it but am now back to Regular Slinkies. it sounds great as you'd expect of a guitar made entirely of 60-year-old mahogany--the body is a one-piece slab the likes of which they'll never make guitars of again--but still needs some help..i apparently fucked up the wiring on the rotary pickup selector switch so the neck and middle pickups are in the wrong switch positions and i also want to add an all-3-pickups and an OFF option so i'll need to swap the current 6-way switch for an 8-way switch which is like $10 on Amazon. happily i still have the rainbow of different-colored hookup wire so it shouldn't make my brain hurt too much. i also worked on the tremolo and it's working pretty solidly for a cheap Chinese imitation of a 60s Japanese surface-mount trem. i need to put some blue LocTite(TM) on the adjuster nut that tightens the collet...it starts to loosen almost immediately, but is good when it's as tight as it'll go. so it's back in the rotation, but still needs work as noted above. perhaps while i have the wiring out this would be a good application for the varitone/tone wheel/tone switch values i gathered awhile back via a second rotary switch. bwaa haa haa.

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in other project news, the thing that blew my mind yesterday was when i checked a vintage parts site in Germany i'd bookmarked years ago because they had a nice Höpf Twisty neck that matches the Höpfner and discovered that not only was it still there like four years later, but that they also have a loaded pickguard from a Höpf Jupiter 64 that has all the electronics and knobs in better condition than mine and the hotter Schaller single-coils used on the Saturn 62. so that's going near the top of the TBD list. all it needs after that is the proper bridge and some way to fix the busted tremolo collet. given the age of the thing i suspect i'll need to get a whole new (old) trem. the Höfner Galaxie neck currently on there is 25.5" scale which is a relief because the later models were 26", but it'll be hard to fit to a body because the heel is 88 mm which is 8 mm deeper back-to-front than a Strat/Jazzmaster pocket. this explains why it was so hard to find a good position for the bridge. so to use it i'll probably either have to find a Höfner body that fits or alter a Fender-style body to suit. i still have two Höfner staple mini-hums from a Kapa guitar that i bought loose off eBay which i'd like to use with this and would love to get a third and do a simplified Galaxie setup but they're very hard to find in operating condition...i couldn't find one despite ages of looking when i started this and it's just as bad now. when i figure out what body to use i'll probably prep a pickguard and wiring harness for 3 pickups and just leave the space open. there's also the option of getting one of the Galaxie reissues and plopping in the vintage pickups, but they're pretty expensive. now, if i could find a loaded Galaxie reissue body i'd be totally sorted. one will probably turn up soon after i finish the project.

i have a replacement pickguard watched on eBay for the Duo Sonic, which is probably the next thing i'll tackle. the Squier DS bodies have the bridge PU 3/4" too far from the bridge which kind of neuters the sound and just looks wrong. replacement guards for OG 50s-early 60s DS will fit and this one is 12-hole like the one now on there. so all i have to do is extend the existing pickup cavity, and i have a Dremel set now so it'll be easier. that guitar doesn't need anything else. the guy who put it together did a great job of aging the components and used quality pots/switch/jack so there's nothing else needed. the tuners could be better, but something other than the old-style Klusons with little white plastic buttons would look wrong. if i get super ambitious i could get a shortie 6-saddle Tele bridge which would help enormously with intonation which is kind of vague and iffy on a 22.5" guitar but i'm not sure i care that much.

i'll have to order an new Filtertron fit kit from TV Jones for the Double Jet because the original owner did a lousy job. don't install expensive boutique pickups if you can't put them in straight. sad! i also need the shallow-depth switches for the pickup and tone switches. the wiring is the hard part here...Gretsches have switches and pots in all kinds of weird places and order and require a lot of wire runs. other than that it just needs put back together. i have all the other parts needed including the Bigsby B5 that used to be on the ES-335 which will work with a bar bridge and cover the mounting holes from the B50 i removed. there's a Dremel gouge in the top i need to treat, probably by filling with cyanoacrylate with perhaps a drop or 2 of black poly finish on top and some judicious sanding. so that's getting put off till everything else is done. i don't want to wait too long, though, because i need Filtertrons in my life.

there are no other projects in-house at this time. i have some ideas i drew up back around 2020, the most interesting of which is a weird take on a Telecaster with pickups from a guy in the UK made like a Supro steel for the bridge and a Kay Hershey bar for the neck assuming he's still there. imagine a rosewood-board Tele with single-coil pickups that still twang but have pounds of mids. i also storyboarded a Squier Starcaster (the semi-hollow one) with WRHBs and a tremolo, a 70s-style Strat with a rosewood board and grey-bobbin pickups, and a Guild Aristocrat with Guild HB-1 pickups and a Guildsby. they're making them with the HB-2 pickups now, but the new ones are a chambered body rather than the OG fully hollow body. none of those are real priorities, though, and i'd probably get a Firebird or a Guild Surfliner before going to that much effort for new sounds. heaven knows it's be easier to buy a Strat with my preferred accoutrements and just change the damn pickups, but GFS used to sell Strat bodies covered in tortoiseshell plastic that i desperately want.

stay tuned.

[dubkitty]

i found the correct bridge for the Höpf on an obscure vintage parts site in the UK for the relative bargain of £59, or $75 with shipping. which is better than the $90-150 i saw others going for. upon testing the Hopf tremolo is fine even with half a collet, so i'm going to roll with it. waiting for my tax refund to come in at which point i can get the rest of the stuff i need for the Höpf for $400 including the upgraded pickups. it should even be reasonably simple to do. weirdly, standard practice with this bridge per photos of vintage Twistys is to use the broader end for the treble side. my parts-seeking motto: keep looking.

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[dubkitty]

naturally i spent a large chunk of yesterday researching stuff for the Kondor. some highlights:

--the DeLisle amp people, who i know and trust from years of interactions on the Gretsch Pages (R.I.P.), sell a vintage-correct Gibson varitone for only $60, which is well worth not having to figure out my own tone switch values. listened to a couple of Gibson varitone demos and i think it'll be really beautiful with the Kondor pickups. and i don't think i could source all the parts and assemble them for little enough to make DIYing worthwhile. so i'll put one in sooner rather than later.
--turns out i wired the pickup rotary switch backwards, which explains why the guitar seemed to sound so unusual. it was supposed to go neck->middle->bridge->m+b->n+b->all, so i thought the ALL setting was the neck pickup. i'll tell you, it sounds fucking hi-fi with all 3 pickups on, just a gorgeous balanced clean tone. so i need to get used to turning the switch the wrong way because i decided i'm not going to bother with replacing the rotary just so i can get neck+bridge which is the most boring subdivision of a 3-pickup array and a OFF position which the volume knob does fine at. the present-day guitar hacker refuses to overwork!
--then i need to find different knobs. i want to keep to the off-white/cream palette of the pickup shells, Guyatone pickup insert, and the world's greatest/dorkiest tremolo knob (i ordered that one specially off eBay because i wanted the Nerd/Absurd Factor), and want matching pointer knobs for the pickup rotary and varitone. i'd like to keep the standard volume and tone controls in the circuit after the varitone so i can roll off treble even when the varitone is being Squeaky Fromme, but the pickguard is awfully crowded control-wise. theoretically there's enough room for the varitone between the rotary and the tone knob at bottom according to various stats and measurements of the guard, but it remains to be seen what would work. i won't know till i actually get everything in and pull the guard off the guitar.
--i'm currently involved in choosing different knobs. pointer knobs 1"-1.2" in diameter including pointer length are not common, cool-looking ones are even harder to find, and colors other than black are less available than i'd like. i think i've settled on these futuristic-looking pointer knobs from Amplified Parts. they look both space-age and cheap, which is exactly the aesthetic i'm going for. i think i'll keep the ivoroid Tele knobs for the volume and tone, though...they look nice and the extra height makes them easier to reach. i need to drill small holes in them for marker dots, though...i'm pretty fanatical about being able to read knob settings.

(not to scale)

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waiting for the confluence of my next paycheck and my $1200 in tax refundage, at which point i'll get the varitone, the guard for the Duo Sonic, and the Höpf parts. that will sort the outstanding guitar project backlog excepting the Double Jet which i'm putting off until i feel ready to deal with all that wiring. i have to put a spending freeze into effect for now because Becky's birthday is Tuesday and Valentine's Day is coming, so we're going away next weekend and i absolutely cannot have my ATM freeze up. do you understand how hard it is not to order a metric fuckton of new stuff with the $6000 of room i have on my credit cards having paid everything off during long COVID when i didn't spend anything for a year and a half? but i don't want to go back to endless monthly payments, and need a new used car this year which i intend to pay for with cash.

turns out the Gemini pickups Telecaster could be way cheaper than i think. the PUs are only $89 each, a bound Sonic Blue body from GFS is $99, and i can probably find a useable Tele neck for less than $150. add some hardware and you have the Tele of Doom for no more than a Squier CV Telecaster. that might push up ahead of the Double Jet because it seems comparatively quite simple. a little bit of soldering, a couple of dozen wood screws, and Bob's your uncle. (yes, i have built a Tele in the past.) the bodies don't even require a Tele jack cup, you can use a plate.

i think all this might be bad for my hypomania, though.

back pages update:
i was having a clearout of my office nook early last year, decided the Musima bodies and necks were too far gone to deal with, and threw them out. i really should have kept the neck that i niced up because it could have been useful, but i was just tired of and frustrated with the stuff and wanted it gone. everything was beat up and needed sanding and refinishing, and i don't want to do that kind of work. it's an awful lot of effort and not really suited to apartment life. i still have a bag of pickups, bridges, rather primitive tuners, and other Ossie bits including a knockoff Hagstrom tremolo which may get recycled in some future project. i don't know what else to do with them because their resale value is essentially zilch even though the single-coils sound pretty good. i might get a playable Musima De Luxe 25V at some point; someone in Baltimore is currently selling one for $250. there seem to be a surprising number of them around. and they're cool, weird offsets with the kind of unusual single-coil sound that's literally music to my ears.

Guild LB-1 mini-humbuckers should fit the P-90 routs in the Guild Aristocrat, but i suspect there may be some cavity mods needed because the Franz pickups aren't as deep as the p-90s. once things get to that point in the projects this should also be pretty simple. i just have to wait for the black and gold-top versions they started selling recently to get into the used market because i would prefer not to have two vaguely identical Aristocrats.

it seems like bodies that will fit the extended heel on the Höfner neck are hard to come by. i think the most likely solution will be a bathtub-route Jazzmaster body with the back on the neck pocket bunged out. that's going way down the list until i find a 3d Höfner staple pickup. there's always the chance a suitable Höfner body will come up, but the Galaxie body would need a custom pickguard to cover up the switch array i wouldn't try to duplicate because i'd use a 7- or 8-way rotary. i'm really into the rotary switch concept for 3-pickup guitars.

the Starcaster and 70's Strat are on the back burner. there are technical issues i have to solve with the Starcaster design and its suitability for a tremolo, and i'm not entirely sold on needing CuNiFe WRHBs. as far as the Strat goes, i'm not playing stuff lately that wants me to sound like Curtis Mayfield. it's quite likely that i'd go with a custom wiring setup with a rotary pickup selector and a varitone-type device in place of the middle knob. i'm leaning towards a particular kind of pickup frequency profile that i can't quantify but can probably be inferred from my favorite pickups. for now the Kondor, the relocated bridge PU on the Duo Sonic, and the Höpf will give me plenty of new variations on single-coil sound to keep me busy for awhile. adding the varitone to the Kondor will give me a total of 36 potential combinations on that guitar alone. if it wasn't for Becky and work i might never leave the apartment again. if all goes well much of this will be done by the time the two pedals i'm waiting on to complete the pedalboard/looping setup. spring is going to be fun this year.

[dubkitty]

i ordered the main remaining bits for the Kondor, the varitone and the pointer knobs above. i'm having a hard time finding ivoroid buttons for the Fender/Ping locking tuners because you don't see replacement Ping buttons out there and i don't know which if any of the common Schaller, Grover, or Gotoh knobs will work. i vaguely remember Schaller knobs working, but could be mistaken. i guess i'll just have to go around the house unscrewing buttons from different tuners to see which if any will work. but the ebony Eastman buttons had to go...they're so big that it was hard to tune without bumping into the adjacent knobs. so i reused the mini-Grover-shaped kidney-bean buttons that originally came with the Ping tuners. they're small for the headstock and look dorky, but i can tune more effectively. so maybe week after next i'll have all that together. this coming weekend i'll be away with Becky celebrating her birthday so though everything's supposed to be here by Saturday i won't have time to get to it till then. dreaming of 36 pickup/varitone combinations till then. with the stock sound of the pickups i should be able to dial in all kinds of odd variations on other Japanese PUs. i suspect a godlike gold-foil sound is waiting in there somewhere. which would save me making a separate guitar for them. i don't really want as many guitars as the number of projects and proposals in my Omnibus Gear Document would give me. too many choices. the only one of the proposals (as different to the projects actually in progress) i'm particularly excited about is the Telecaster. this is intended to solve all the problems i have with Teles while preserving the things i like. see below.

dorky, but ergonomic.

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other than the tuner buttons which are a minor annoyance, i'm just about done with this one. i might try putting the Bigsby aluminum bridge i used originally back on because i recall i liked the tone better than the steel Teisco type though i'd need to get an uncompensated Bigsby saddle or my plain G will never, ever play in tune which is why it retired. happily saddles compensated for an unwound G are easy to come by since FMIC finally realized that nobody but retrobillies or jazz guys uses a wound G on electric guitar any more. i kind of hope i don't have to do anything with the bridge. the guitar seems fairly happy as is. but if it has to change to improve, so be it. it's pretty close to dialed in now though.

the Hondo logo and oddball headstock shape used to bother me, but now i kind of like them. i think i just got used to them being part of the vibe.

that spending freeze didn't last long, huh? i figured as long as i was out of pedge i may as well get the Duo Sonic pickguard as well. i loves me some PayPal Pay In 4.