Update:
So, from what it says in the most recent email notification, my Luthier supplies should be arriving in the post on the 10th of this month next Thursday, so, not this coming weekend, but the following weekend is when I'll start getting stuck into finishing the body and neck, will continue to upload pics of my progress while I do the finishing work so stay tuned for further updates.
Update:
Seeing as I was close to doing all the body/neck finishing work, I decided to go ahead and drill all the mounting holes for the screws that held the scratchplate, bridge, trem-spring cavity cover, jack plate, and strap buttons in place rather than wait till I had finished doing all the finishing work, I managed to get the bridge into what I think is the correct position for it, in the process of drilling the mounting screw holes, I figured out how to keep the mounting screw holes aligned with one another...I used the bridge itself as a drilling template, by using some small pieces of 2.5mm perfboard I found that I only needed about three pieces of perfboard to use as a shim between the front of the sustain block and the wood of the trem routing, this kept the bridge oriented 90 degrees with respect to the centreline of the neck, all I then had to do was to move the bridge side-to-side relative to the neck to get the two E-Strings equidistant from the edge of the fretboard ( the two E-Strings ended up about 4.5mm away from the edge of the fretboard at the 21st fret), so I'm happy that the bridge seems to be aligned pretty well, I checked the scale length from the 12th fret to the bridge and I think I have the bridge positioned correctly to give enough adjustment for intonation.
So, all that needs to be done is to wait till my Luthier supplies get here and then get to work on finishing the neck and body, once I have all the other bits I need (ordered from Realtone Music) I'll be able to wire-up the scratchplate while the finish on the neck and body is drying, fun times ahead!!!
As always....stay tuned for more updates
P.S. Drilling all the mounting holes now avoids me having to risk damaging the finish on my guitar, better to get any remaining issues sorted out now rather than later.
I am glad you drilled all the holes before applying the finish.
One small slip can cause spontainious out breaks of involuntary Tourettes....
There is always a workaround for glitches, mistakes and other Guitar building gremlins.....
And choice words like bumOriginally Posted by dingobass
If I had've drilled the holes after applying the finish and made a small slip, I probably would have used some pretty colourful language deemed unsuitable/inappropriate for this forum, then did my my best impression of an epileptic butterfly while waving my hands madly in the air and muttering something that sounded like incomprehensible babbling spoken backwards, I'm sure....lol.
I'm feeling pretty happy with how all the hardware has installed on my guitar so far, thankfully I haven't experienced any serious issues, I did have to do some filing of the scratchplate near the hole for the mounting screw adjacent for the high-E string saddle though, anyway I reckon I'm well and truly ready for the next stage in the build-process.
Last edited by DrNomis_44; 04-03-2016 at 04:04 PM.
I'm trying to get it done haha definitely slow and steady! Not sure when I'll have time to wire again :/ I won't set the neck until we move as it will be easier to move the guitar in the box it came in, in its 2 main pieces
Good luck with the move mate, hope it all goes well, since moving to Darwin from Kununurra, I had to do over ten moves to a new place to live till I ended up where I live now, not long after I moved in I wanted to move out to a new place again due to all the trouble with noise from my neighbors, one of them lived in a flat directly above mine and they would decide to have a very loud domestic argument every night at very late hours just when I was trying to get some sleep so I'd have the energy to go to uni in the morning, not much fun at all for me.
Been seriously thinking of moving to Cairns lately.
Update:
Just for fun, I thought I would go ahead and get the scratchplate all wired-up just so I could test out the AS57 pickups to make sure they all work, fortunately they all do work, I was able to pinch a 5-way pickup-selector switch from another spare guitar which would do for the time being, and I managed to find a .1uF/100V greencap to use as a tone cap, then i decided to just go ahead and build the guitar up, string it up, and do a quick setup on it to get it to a playable state, I'm going to be sanding the body anyway and the build will enable me to check for any un-obvious issues I may have missed during my mock build, turns out there was one issue, the first-fret action was way too high with the stock plastic nut so I got out my set of 42-09 gauge nut-slot files and my set of feeler-gauges and got to work filing the nut-slots, I went through and filed each nut-slot so that there was a clearance of .020 of an inch (according to fender specs) between the underside of each string and the top of the first fret, that made a big difference.
On the bone nut, I noticed that the nut-slots were cut a bit too narrow for 42-09 gauge strings, but since I'm going to be fitting the bone nut after the body and neck finish-work has been done, I'll be waiting till then to use my set of nut-slot files to rectify that small issue.
As it currently is, my guitar seems to be sounding pretty good apart from it having a real bad habit of being a magnet for hum-noise, i may replace the current pickups with a set of ASN57's which is the noiseless version of the AS57's, I have the bridge earthed correctly, and everything else is grounded, I don't have any shielding in place, that's all, maybe some shielding-tape might get rid of the hum, we'll have to see.
Can't wait till my Luthier supplies get here this coming week so I can start doing the final finishing work.
Incidentally, it seems I got the position of the bridge correct since all the strings intonated pretty well, none of the saddles ended up too far forward.
Last edited by DrNomis_44; 06-03-2016 at 03:53 PM.
Update:
I just had one of the AS57 pickups (the bridge one) go faulty on me, it's gone open-circuit so that instead of reading about 6k it reads infinite ohms, not having a good run with these Entwistle pickups, I had some trouble with my Ibby guitar not sounding like it was supposed to, turns out the bridge Entwistle HDN pickup had been wired-up incorrectly at the factory where it was made, it had been wired up so that only one of the coils worked, the wires that were supposed to have gone to the other coil had been soldered together and the short wires coming out of the non-functional coil had been soldered together too, i have since fixed the bridge HDN pickup so it is working as a Humbucker rather than a single coil.
I'm not going to bother getting a replacement for the faulty AS57 pickup since I'm going to be swapping them out anyway.
Did you pull the cover off it? something i see a lot when strat type pups go dead, the lead in or lead out wire snaps.
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