Dual Build: GSJ-1 and GSM-1

[Simon Barden]

The Bare Knuckle pickup arrived yesterday and my 3mm thick fibreboard for a spacer arrived today, so I made the spacer. Found it was just a bit too tall, so had fun sanding it down at an angle. Here it is stuck with double-sided tape so it was easy to rub along the sandpaper stuck to another bit of wood.


Got that the right height, coloured it a dark black with some spirit stain, fitted the pickup and stuck the soldering iron into the finish on the back doing so. Darn it (I didn't say). At least I can touch it up with a brush.

So here is the Nantucket 90 in position. It sounds so much better. It's still quite bright and jangly, but now its got some real grunt but cleans up nicely. I wired the tone pot connection the 'vintage' way to the volume pot output, so there';s no need for a treble bleed circuit and it does clean up well with a slight turn of the volume pot. The tone control (I used a WD Music 0.022uF PIO cap as an experiment) works well and smoothly as well, so I'm happy with that.



The bridge is angling forward slightly between its support slots on the bridge post, and as a result, the low E isn't sitting properly in its saddle slot (the saddles are really about 1mm too low on this bridge to my way of thinking). But I think the original saddle's posts have a smaller gap between the supports, so I'll try those with it tomorrow, otherwise I'll make up some metal shims to try and fill the gaps (he says hopefully).

Only minor things left now - all finish corrections.

[king casey]

Looks great Simon.
cheers, Mark.

[Bakersdozen]

The Bare Knuckle pickup arrived yesterday and my 3mm thick fibreboard for a spacer arrived today, so I made the spacer. Found it was just a bit too tall, so had fun sanding it down at an angle. Here it is stuck with double-sided tape so it was easy to rub along the sandpaper stuck to another bit of wood.


Got that the right height, coloured it a dark black with some spirit stain, fitted the pickup and stuck the soldering iron into the finish on the back doing so. Darn it (I didn't say). At least I can touch it up with a brush.

So here is the Nantucket 90 in position. It sounds so much better. It's still quite bright and jangly, but now its got some real grunt but cleans up nicely. I wired the tone pot connection the 'vintage' way to the volume pot output, so there';s no need for a treble bleed circuit and it does clean up well with a slight turn of the volume pot. The tone control (I used a WD Music 0.022uF PIO cap as an experiment) works well and smoothly as well, so I'm happy with that.



The bridge is angling forward slightly between its support slots on the bridge post, and as a result, the low E isn't sitting properly in its saddle slot (the saddles are really about 1mm too low on this bridge to my way of thinking). But I think the original saddle's posts have a smaller gap between the supports, so I'll try those with it tomorrow, otherwise I'll make up some metal shims to try and fill the gaps (he says hopefully).

Only minor things left now - all finish corrections.

Or some locking bridge posts might so the trick? There are some cheaper ones around if you can find them.