Michael's First PBG Build - TL-1

[michaelS31]

So I gave her a fret level on the weekend, strung her up and she sounds great, but my string bends keep choking out, on the top 3 strings. Anything higher than a semi tone bend on e,b,g strings above 11th fret chokes out. Can anyone shed light on that situation? Do the higher frets need to be a bit lower than the others?

I also ordered some tele bridge pickup screws to replace the stopgap ones I have there.

I'm going to leave the string through holes in place, even though they are non functional, I was proud of drilling them.

Anyway, some pics to keep everyone sane.

Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk

[Simon Barden]

It's difficult to say without seeing the guitar in the flesh. My first reaction would to be to give the truss rod a small tighten and raise the strings slightly to compensate (and repeat as necessary). The truss rod doesn't affect the top few frets, so the overall bridge height is often driven by how well you can bend on the higher frets. If you raise the saddles, then you can straighten the neck to compensate. You don't want a convex/back curve in the neck, but you can go right down to flat (especially as you've levelled the frets).

I have got a couple of guitars where I've reduced the height of the last few frets in order to stop choking, but that's from bending higher up the neck, at the 17th fret,not from the 12th and it was normally over a tone's bend before that happens. And they were 7.25" radius necks which will choke out more easily. The standard PBG neck radius is 12", so there shouldn't be choking problems.