I am yet to get up the courage to try and rout out the pickup pockets on my ESB-4. The arched top and bottom surfaces on the body make it really hard to come up with a simple routing solution.
I am yet to get up the courage to try and rout out the pickup pockets on my ESB-4. The arched top and bottom surfaces on the body make it really hard to come up with a simple routing solution.
Here's how it looks when I put the neck and bridge where they should be relative to the pickup in ~p-bass position...
The bridge moves around 2cm closer to the strap button, and the neck moves about the same...
Last edited by fender3x; 16-09-2018 at 05:06 AM.
Wondering why you wouldn't grab another one of those PUP's and push the neck a bit further forward, somewhere nearer where it might have been originally?Originally Posted by fender3x
Here's how it looks when I put the neck and bridge where they should be relative to the pickup in ~p-bass position...
The bridge moves around 2cm closer to the strap button, and the neck moves about the same...
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# 3 - Non PBG Tele https://goo.gl/W14G5g
# 4 - Non PBG J Bass https://goo.gl/FbBaFy
# 5 - TL-1AR GOTM Aug 2017 https://goo.gl/sUh14s
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Well, I haven't ruled that out yet. At the moment though, I have only located one of these pups. It was NOS, and I don't think either of the Bill Lawrence companies make them anymore...but we'll see if I can find one. If I can find a Gibson G3, like on the old Grabber basses, that might be good. Also designed by Bill Lawrence. But so far I am not sure what to do with that rout...if anything at all.
I will probably do some testing... I noticed that a mini humbucker I had lying around would also fit. The longer I stew about this the more I feel like firing up the old testbed....
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Last edited by fender3x; 17-09-2018 at 03:14 AM.
I reckon that could look quite nice, proportionally speaking...
First (proper) build: http://www.buildyourownguitar.com.au...ead.php?t=8546
Second build: http://www.buildyourownguitar.com.au...ad.php?t=10229
Thanks for the vote of confidence! It's starting to feel like it could e a bass someday ;-)
So after I logged off, having just replied to Waz... I went and took another look at the bass. The "rosewood" fingerboard is 90%+ of what overhangs the neck pickup rout... So I actually could have a humbucker in there if I sliced off the overhang...and the scale would still put the mid-pup in the p-bass location.
So I did another search, and found another one of these EB50 pickups had just been listed on eBay, from the same seller, in fact. So...I bought that one too. Hope it sounds good... Will probably have to trim some pup rings for the neck position, but it will definitely fit.
I have spent an immense amount of time thinking about to figure out how to deal with the neck joint. I was having a really hard time figuring out what angle the neck needed to be. In part this is because the bottom of the neck pocket is not flat, but rather slopes down as it goes toward the heel. Since this is an archtop body, I need it to clear the pickups without making the bridge rise too high. That is complicated by the fact that the bridge will be around 2 cm closer to the strap-button than it would normally be, so a bit further down the arch.
I have been using different block sizes and different angles, and I think I finally got them close to righttoday... the simplest solution seems to be to put a flat piece of wood in the bottom of the pocket that will raise the bottom about 5/8" (16mm). It will then need ashim to raise the heel end by about 1.2 degrees... I tried it with scrap I have around, and that should be pretty close.
So now my question is about wood. First, what should I use for the block to raise the bottom? I had thought about maple. I am not sure whether I care about matching color, but the maple I have is a little darker than the back and sides so, it may not matter. Maple is super dense and heavy, but man is it a pain to work. On the last build I sanded down some pickup rings to fit the archtop that were made of maple...and I thought I would grow old and die doing it.
I also have some pine, that is much lighter and easier to work, but I wonder if it's strong enough? I know it's sometimes used in guitars, but it's also used in Tae Kwon Do because it's easy to break...
Or I could go to my old favorite, poplar. I can get it cheap, and it's strong and easy to work, and it seems like a good compromise wood...particularly if it gets painted.
The other question is about the shims. I found some at the home depot that are cedar. They are just the right angle, amazingly and were relatively cheap. It seems to me for a thin shim cedar should be fine. I know it's sometimes used for acoustic guitar tops, but it's even lighter than the pine. Still, the angle is just right, and I don't think I need to glue it in since it will sit on top of the block...
Curious what folks think?
Realized I was never going to be able to reach the 20th fret...and to get the mid pup to line up correctly losing a bit of the end of the fretboard would help...so...no more 20th fret. This is how it lines up now...
I also answered made the plug for the neck pocket to raise it up...and in the process had a bit of a fortuitous accident.
I found some poplar came 3/4" x 2.5" strips...so I bought a foot of it, and went to work. I sanded the sides to fit the pocket and used my very crappy bench saw to trim about 1/8" off the height. What I did not realize when I started the cut was that the blade on the bench saw was slightly off 90 degrees, so the piece was a 16th of an inch too high on one side...
Remember how on this cheap Kmise neck the fingerboard is higher on the treble side than the bass side? A little careful sanding, and the "plug" now compensates for the difference in the sides of the fingerboard. I am not sure I could have done this on purpose, but voila! I knew I would need to compensate for the fingerboard, but figured I'd do it with by adjusting the bridge up a bit on one side. I was not sure whether this is something that you'd be able to see, but the lateral problem is now taken care of. The only other problem related to this that I see at the moment is that the nut slot is, effectively, deeper on the treble side than the bass side. I have been cutting a nut to compensate out of bone... More on that once it's ready...
I still needed to adjust the neck angle in the conventional way, and do do that I glued a 1.5 degree angle shim to the top of the plug. Actually two shims side by side as one was not wide enough. The glue is drying at the moment...
Will post more as it goes into place... but there will be much thinking about how to get the rest of the pocket cut. I decided that to get the mid pickup in the right place it would be easier to do some additional routing to the neck pocket than to fill and re-rout the pickup cavities. Whether that was good thinking or not depends a lot on figuring out how to rout the neck pocket on an archtop!
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