RC-4 "The Cole"...

[Arzi]

Soldering and testing if electrics work

Just finished soldering the pickup wires. Had a bit of pot and grounding problems. Both of my volume pots were dead - I may have caused it myself when practicing soldering and using too much solder and time on top of pots. Don't know if this burns the insides or something. Anyway no biggie cause I had ordered a dozen of both A and B 500k pots. These are ridiculously cheap from China - also cheap quality but easily replaceable if needed.

After changing the pots one of my wires needed replacing as well.

Then used my Vox Amplug for bass headphone amp to test the pickups and pots. Plug it in and tapping the pickups with a small screwdriver and you can test both volume and tone. If you have any amp with headphone output that works as well. I don't know how others do this but this is one I thought of.

Now it's just fretwork, truss rod cover and then stringing it up. Can't wait for the big day...

[stan]

great job Arzi, you must be happy with it

[Fretworn]

Speechless Arzi. That is beautiful.

[Arzi]

Hi,

Got a moment of time in the evening and it's now well over midnight.

Did the fretwork...

Put the strings on cause could not wait...

Adjusted a bit of the truss rod...

Adjusted the intonation and string height...

Filed the nut...

And "The Cole" came alive! It works great! Still got things to do with the truss rod cover and some more adjusting later on but what matters is that it works...

Will post pics when I get the chance but now I gotta sleep.

[wokkaboy]

nice one Arzi look forward to seeing finished pics

[stan]

Great news Arzi

[crundes]

Nice work Arzi! Looks fantastic :-)

[Arzi]

HI,

so here are some pics for you. One shows the "poor man´s fret levelling beam" I developed. I was not ready to pay almost 100 euros for beam and adhesive papers. I walked to a near by hardware store and bought a 20cm "bubble beam" and regular hobby paper glue my kids use to make their own "cut and paste" postcards. I cut some wet sanding paper strips and glued them for about 10 minutes with a clamp and voila - had a sanding beam. Worked perfectly and the paper was easy to change as you could just peel the old one off. Cost me 4,90 euros total cause I had the paper already.

The individual bridge saddles at the end were about 1-1,5mm towards the E-string. Still the strings are perfectly in line with the neck so I don´t know what caused this. Could be the bridge pickup cavity is a bit off but it doesn´t matter cause it does not affect playing. String spacing is even 20mm at the bridge between all strings.

The neck of course is somewhat wider than my jazz I use at the moment so feels slower of course.

The nut was ridiculously high as you can see in the pics and I still have some filing to do cause it´s still too high for my liking ( about 0,35mm at the first fret when pressing 3rd fret down). I might still put the bone nut on later cause as you can see the strings go too deep in to the nut. MIght also file this one down - don´t know yet.

The truss rod works fine and at the moment I´m about in the middle of all positions at the adjustments so have plenty of wiggle room left. Intonated great.

So here you have them. Gonna do the truss rod cover after I get my logo designed.

[Arzi]

And more pics....

[bargeloobs]

That's a piece of art right thur! Love it.