i know, BUT THE WAITING, WAITING!Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
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i know, BUT THE WAITING, WAITING!Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
So.... Decided to finish the guitar in a satin finish, but only have the poly in gloss, so decided to make my own wipe on poly satin.
The poly is diluted with mineral spirits, which is an american product. Its Aussie counterpart is very hard to find as the research says it could be, white spirits, turpentine, methylated spirits or some sort of enamel thinners.
I decided to experiment and came up with a good alternative.
40% polyurethane satin (or gloss), 30% methylated spirits and 30% turpentine (turps). Using straight turps it takes too long to dry, using straight meths it dries too fast.
This mixture dries fast enough and is thin enough to rag on.
Pics below. I used a floor poly as it goes real hard and is scratch resistant.
Attachment 15449 Attachment 15450
Attachment 15451 Attachment 15452
This is 15 mins after poly application, it has just tacked off.
Next i cut out a new backplate from the leftover pickguard material blank. Still have holes to drill. I ordered some extra gold screws in case i ran short.
Attachment 15453
You're almost there!
Yea, now the obligatory waiting game as i build up coats. cheersQuote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
Looking good man. Nice work with the poly mix - I've thinned Tru-Oil before but never the wipe-on poly. Neat bit of experimental chemistry there. Love the new cavity cover!
cheers,
Gav.
Thanks Gavin, seems like its the only way to go, everyone on this forum experiments, its so cool annd you learn so muchQuote:
Originally Posted by gavinturner
next question, do i have the pickups round the right way?
Attachment 15463
I'm pretty sure the bridge pick up is around the wrong way. The poles need to go towards the bridge.
Hopefully someone will confirm this for you soon.
Yes thats what l was thinking but not sure with twin rails and single pickup in each slotQuote:
Originally Posted by Zandit75
Did the packaging they came with give you any clues? Sometimes they tell you which bits go where. The deadest giveaway is which side the wires come out of as that tends to usually be on the downside and heading towards control cavity. The fact these have their name stamped on them also suggests you have them positioned right way around.
The Toneriders on my EX-1 has the screws at the back on each PUP so there goes the theory for having reversed slugs & screw pole pieces yet the factory ones on my Slash Epi LP have the usual screws outermost? Go figga???
For standard humbuckers, having the adjustable screws facing the bridge (on the bridge pickup) and the neck (on the neck pickup) was merely an aesthetic consideration when Gibson started fitting them. They could easily have been fitted another way around and that would have become the accepted norm. here may be a very small variation in the sound due to slightly different responses from the individual coils in each pickup, but it really is minimal. They can be reversed and it wouldn't sound any different.
The Seymour Duncan P-Rails pups, on which these seem to have been roughly based, do have distinct bridge and neck pickup versions, where on the bridge pickup, the screws are by the bridge and the rail faces inwards, and no the neck, the screws face the neck and the rail faces inwards, with the SD logos both located in their standard place.
As one of the three coils on the Warmans is very different to the other two, there probably is going to be a more noticeable difference in the sound depending which way round they are orientated, especially in the bridge position when tapped. I'd leave sufficient cable so that they can be fit both ways round, and you simply try them out and find which orientation sounds best (probably easiest when in single coil mode).
With these Warmans, you need to remember that they are low-cost Asian made pups, and from the photos the Warman logo seems to be a sticky label, probably applied by hand. There doesn't appear from the website that there are specific neck and bridge versions of the pup, so I'm not surprised that they stick the label in the same place. There is one photo on the Warman site of a black version of the G-Rails with the adjustment screws in the bridge facing position and a printed (not a sticker) Warman logo, so it seems that they aren't that sure themselves!
I'd be very tempted to remove the Warman labels and fit them whichever way round you think is best.
You say they are low cost Asian made pups, well that may be true , aside from selling direct, cutting out the middle man, the owner has been associated with guitars for 30 years and uses them so do a lot of high end guitar players in the UK, the reviews are good and the sound demos on Youtube are excellent so they are good enough for me, hey pitbull Guitars are Low cost Asian made guitars and i love them and think they are a cut above the rest, so go figure......Just because they are cheap and made in Asia doesnt necessarily mean they sound cheap.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
As for your advice on the pups, thanks.......will give them a go as they are. cheers.
No clue with th packaging im afraid.Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
Ok, will give them a go as is then reverse them and see what i like best..cheers Waz
Hi Nitro, just curious to know if they both have the wires coming out on the same side when you look at them from above?
Hi Nitro, I obviously didn't convey my meaning correctly and I'm sorry i seem to have wound you up a bit. My apologies. I just meant that they are built in an Asian factory and are priced at the budget end of the pickup scale. They are no different in that respect to other UK designed, Asian-built pickups like Toneriders or Irongear (and I use and like Irongear ones quite a lot and will be fitting some on my ES-3). But they are built down to a cost, so sometimes the frills like the labelling suffers in comparison to the Seymour Duncans/DiMarzios of this world. I was not trying to imply that the sound would be cheap or poor and that you had made a bad choice.
As they aren't sold in matched sets, you may find that the neck pickup has a louder output than the bridge, so you may find that keeping the neck pickup as low as it can go may help even out the volumes. Then again this may not be an issue.
Heres a pic of the front and back of the pickguardQuote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
Attachment 15487 Attachment 15488
No worries Simon, appreciate you getting back to me and your advice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
Hi Nitro, judging by the reverse side of the pickguard shot I reckon you have them facing the right way.
Did you run a multi meter across the wires to see if either PUP had a higher or low impedance as the lower impedance usually goes in the neck position? If they read the same no big deal as you can balance the noise level by raising or lowering the PUP's to get the desired separation when using the 3 way toggle switch. Personally I prefer to have most PUP's at similar volume and allow their positioning and tonal characteristics do their thing without suffering dramatic drops in noise level when switching between them.
No doubt plenty others will jump in with their opinions too and that is fine as it all comes down to what works best for you the player, not what everyone else thinks.
Looks like you will have a ton of fun experimenting with all the sound combinations once fully wired up.
Thanks WAZ for all your help, i have a multi meter but not quite sure what settings to have it on to get a correct reading, any clues?Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
Quick lesson in impedences?
btw i like both pups to have the same volume level.
Waz, from the Warman web site, they only make one version of the pickup, so it's not bridge/neck specific. http://www.warmanguitars.co.uk/produ...hybrid-pickup/.
But they do have this picture of the pickup on the website with the lettering such that it looks like a bridge version.
Attachment 15518
So, it's down to the user to decide which way fits/looks/sounds best. But if you are going to rotate the bridge pickup, then it might look a bit funny with the name on backwards compared to the other one - which is mainly why I suggested removing the labels.
Just been looking at the SD site, and looking at their humbuckers with slugs and screws, the cable always comes out of the left-hand side of the screw bobbin (if the screw bobbin is uppermost). So on the neck pickup, it comes out on the side furthest away from the controls; on the bridge it comes out on the side nearest the controls. This is the same as on a set of Toneriders on a guitar I've just been working on.
Yes removing the labels would be a good idea, but im still not quite sure which way up they go, when i asked warman guitars about them he said that you can use two g rails in the one guitar. Would it make much difference polarity wize which way up they are?Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
No, there's no polarity difference by simply rotating the pickups. The outputs would still have the same phase. You'd need to flip the magnets over to change the phase.
Apart from taking the strings off to do it, it's easy to rotate a pickup after the guitar is completed. I'd wait until then before deciding on your final configuration. You just leave enough cable spare to do this.
Hi Nitro, Simon is right in that it is easy to flip the orientation provided there is enough cable length and the PUP rout is deep enough to bring the cable down from the low E side.
Hmmm, Multimeters? I am no expert either but there should be a section that measures impedance and on mine I just kept flicking the rotary switch until it started giving me a reading and then moved it a couple more notches until I found something that gave a set of numbers that made sense - anything from 6.0 up to 15.0 or maybe even higher on these bad boys.
Edit: when doing the coil splitting on Entwistles and Toneriders they specifically mentioned splitting to screws on one and slugs on the other as this gives slightly different sounds - Slugs on the Bridge & Screws on the Neck. When I did the Splits on the EX-5 humbuckers it did not like the opposing wiring and ended up doing them the same. You may be in for a bit of experimentation before you get the sounds you want and which way they are facing may not have as much of an impact to their sound.
Thats cool, i dont usually cut the cables anyways, makes it easier to pull apart if need be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
ok, cheers. Im going withe warmans standard 3 way split wiring diagram first then i might experiment. will leave out the phase reversal switch though.Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
That makes sense.
Linear taper for Volume and Audio for Tone is odd as it is usually the other way around? I tend to use Audio for everything (volume & tone) as the roll off is not as savage and feels more progressive plus if you cook one when soldering not such a big deal if you have plenty of the same on hand as backups.
Yes, I think that diagram is wrong as well. Doesn't matter about what the pickups are, it's the matching of the output level changes to the way the ear hears volume changes that's important, and for that you need a Log/Audio pot (the 'Audio' in the name gives it away).
Definitely log for volume, linear for tone.
Here's the Warman G-Rails pickup spec sheet. This gives the coil resistances.
http://www.warmanguitars.co.uk/wp-co...man_G-rail.pdf
I'm not sure if your pickups already have some wired twisted together, but the Warman diagram lists six wires (plus a ground wire) coming from it, whilst their diagram only show 4 wires plus what must be the shield, and seems to be missing the red and white wires - which must be pre-connected. The spec sheet says that the brown wire is pre-soldered to the ground/shield, but to implement the wiring diagram as shown, it must be separated.
This pickup is actually more complicated to wire than I thought. Because the twin rails is a humbucker in it's own right, adding in the single coil can either be done in parallel (thinner sound), or in series (thicker sound). Neither of these modes is likely to be fully hum-cancelling, simply because you've got three coils (and you need pairs of balanced coils to cancel hum). In theory the output from the humbucker rails should already have any noise cancelled out, so when added to the signal from single coil, there's no opposite-phase noise signal to react with. Because the overall output signal is stronger than the single coil on its own, the noise level will be reduced, but not fully negated.
I'll ask my mate Max if he has any suggestions (though he'll probably just say to stick switches everywhere so that all combinations are possible).
Max suggested having it so that you have it so that you get the rails in series, rails in parallel and the single coil on its own. Or you could try one of the blades plus the single coil for a mismatched humbucker, though there's no guarantee that it will be particularly quiet.
The single coil and the outer blade (Coils 1 and 3) would give a fatter humbucker sound than twin blades would, but unfortunately the north/south magnet polarity means that you'd need to use the inside blade and the single coil (coils 2 and 3) to get a humbucking configuration. This would give a slightly wider gap between the coils than you get with the blades, and for the bridge pickup, the sensed string area is a bit further away from the bridge, so the lower harmonics of notes will be a bit stronger too, making it sound a bit fatter.
The thoughts of having all three coils in non-humbucking series at a 20k-ish resistance filled him with horror (and he has designed a couple of pickups for Fender and Kent Armstrong).
Cheers Simon, ill post you a pic of my wiring diagram and see if you can take a look at it and maybe draw me the variation that your mate max suggests, thats if its not too much trouble or just tell me what to do on mine and ill try to do the rewiring, thanks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
Edit..... Heres a pic, volume wires need correcting though
Attachment 15524
Ok thanks will have a play around.Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
Seems that what my mate Max suggested requires more than a DPDT switch to do. He was talking about PRS style rotary selector switches. So unless you want to get very complicated, I'd probably stick to what you've got - humbucker, single coil and humbucker and single coil in parallel. I'll have a look at your hand-drawn wiring diagram as you seem to have some ground connections missing (or at least not indicated) and I'm not 100% sure about the colours tying in with the descriptions in the data sheet and the original wiring diagram you found.
No, your diagram is correct (I needed my glasses on to see it in more detail) - with the exception of your switch position explanation. Like any 3-way pickup selector switch, the middle position will be both pickups selected i.e. single coil and humbucker in parallel, whilst the outer positions will be humbucker only and single coil only.
If you are using the standard kit 3-position pickup selector switch, then you might benefit from some reduced noise pick-up by running a ground wire to the switch casing connection.
I've also just realised that the single coil pickup has staggered height pole pieces. So to keep the single coil sound balanced, you're best keeping the pickups the way you've got them in your photos.
Cheers mateQuote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
a mega job Nitro, a very cool beast indeed
The switch explanation is for the mini on on on switches not the main pickup selector, as that is standard on all 3 way switchesQuote:
Originally Posted by Simon Barden
Appreciate that Stan, enjoying every minute of itQuote:
Originally Posted by stan