looks great. what's holding it up? it kinda looks like you have taken the photo as it is flying across the room!
Love MOP too, classic!
Cheers! I made up a rig to hold the body up through the jack cavity and had the neck hanging until I put 'em together (wanted my neck hanger back). Close cropping to hide the redneck contraption that includes a pair of clamps, some old ali tubing, steel cable ties and part of an old guitar stand!Originally Posted by Andyxlh
And yeah - MOP. It's the goods. I found an old boom box in ewaste a few years ago with it on cassette still in the player, and the van I was using for moving gear at the time had a tape deck still, so I started to get some appreciation for it again!
Cheers yeah, certainly was. Worst thing was that I was a senior tech in a room full of young blokes who'd never really heard or seen cassettes before much less an old boom box outside of the movies. Boom box works pretty well too I gotta say. Not parting with that retro-ness (but then I still have my parents Technics stereo circa 1982-83 so ya know...).
Good pic cheers, but the damn thing sitting up there in full view is taunting me. I've determined today is the last day I'm going to keep adding coats over the decals. It's pretty damn close to flat, and buried far enough to not look like they've just been stuck on there. Next sand will be hard over the decals to bring em down a bit further, then a full body sand at 1200 followed by a full coat. If that looks half way reasonable, I'll leave it sit there for a few days then move it to the wall for a few weeks. I've got some leave in October, so will be gunning to get it polished, wired and setup ready to go.
Last edited by lunaticds; 09-09-2021 at 01:11 PM.
Where this build is up to:
- Hanging on the wall post a 1200 grit rub down and recoat. The decals aren't entirely gone but they look like they belong there at least. I don't want to put any more TO on it - the amber is starting to overtake the red, and i know that I'll need more in the future. It looks like i should be able to polish that up nicely once its had some time to harden up properly.
- Pickups are *somewhere*. Possibly still in the US, possibly in AU waiting to be scanned in. Don't know. It's probably a good thing that they're not here yet or I might be tempted to put them in already and make my life miserable when I go to polish this next month.
Given the sheer investment into this guitar, I'm pretty keen to get it set up.
Build summary:
- TB-4 kit
- Gotoh mini black machine heads
- Babicz FCH bridge
- EMG 35HZ Passive soapbars + electronics
- Gotoh black neck plate
I could nearly have brought an Epiphone Thunderbird for what I've sunk into this so far, but I'd be stuck with pickups I didn't want, holes for a pick guard I hate and no real experience in doing anything.
Suitable pickups for this were a challenge to find. There seem to be few options - especially passive and the options that do exist are either cheap and unknown or just expensive.
I'm a fairly impatient bugger, and in lieu of being able to get any of 4 guitars finished due to bits all being in transit, a brand new TV that arrived broken (our old one recently died), and not much else to do.. I decided to get closer to finishing this off.
I gave a few areas a rub down with some 3000 grit, then gave it a fairly gentle hand polish with some Maguiars Ultimate compound before a quick layer of wax - including over the fret board. A quick run over the neck showed a few frets were a little high, so I filed them down, re-dressed them and got that sorted out.
The nut is now graphite. I'd ordered the bone when I ordered the kit, but decided I wasn't putting white on it.. and I wasn't keen on keeping the plastic, so I swapped that out yesterday.
The polishing was done - and its by no means perfect. I decided that too much shine would detract from the grain and the fact that I never spent enough time sanding is always kinda evident when you look carefully at it, so I don't see any point in aiming for perfection.
I decided then to get on with the hardware that I currently have - the tuners and the bridge. The bridge took some getting my head around. Thinking I had the action as low as it could go, I was trying to work out how I was going to get about another 3mm out of it - the action was quite simply too high. After staring at the gap between the mount posts and bottom of the bridge and thinking bad thoughts.. I realised that I could actually get more out of it.. and it's now down to an almost acceptable height. I'd really like to get it a fraction lower, but it's within a mm or so of my trusty old Yamaha so I can deal with it.
I threw on a couple of kit strings just to see how the action was going to look. When I'm finished they'll get tossed for a set of DR Blacks. Right now they're not even on the tuners properly - they're literally slotted through just to hold in place.
Comfort-wise, unless the pickups weigh about a kg, it's horrendously top heavy. I considered an anchor point through the neck plate to see if that would help it balance better but it appears not. I put the kit pickups in just to see how that would effect balance, but not where near enough. The balance point feels like its somewhere between the 12th and 15th fret, so changing the anchor point doesn't seem like it'll be enough to counter balance it.
I've ordered some truck tyre weights - lead.. just for their weight. Each block is 50g, I figure I'll create an internal barrier to go inside the cavity over the pots, then load line it with just enough weight to balance it out. Hopefully a couple hundred grams in the right spot will be enough to do the job, but I've got a kg worth coming just in case.
I completely stringed this up yesterday with the kit strings. I figured it wouldn't hurt to get a feel for it and see how it behaves.
I added a little relief to the neck as it was a bit buzzy when I started to dial in the action now that it's fully tuned. It's still a little higher than I'd like, but that bridge is bloody chunky and thick. The posts sitting up a couple mm over the body doesn't do much for that problem. I will look at some timber shims and see if I bring the neck up a bit and see if I can get that action down that way.
It's playable enough at its current height, but I think it's capable of being improved, so it's worth trying. It probably wouldn't have been a problem if I was using the kit bridge, but me being me wanting to use the Babicz bridge that is possibly the most ludicrously bulky bridge I've ever seen..
I have the same bridge on my EX-4. I had countersunk the holes for the screw posts before installing the bridge so that it sat flat against the body "full contact". The action was quite high but after adjusting the truss rod and the saddles I actually had to tweak the saddles to increase the action of a couple of strings because they were too low.
Yeah I reckon if I was gonna do another one using one of these bridges, I'd do that. I did think, about 2 minutes after I'd belted those posts down, that countersinking would have been a good idea. I didn't have anything big enough at the time to do that with anyway, but hindsight... a wonderful thing. I very much doubt I'll get them out without damage, so won't even bother trying. Not sure if I shove some timber over them and try to belt them down will get much more out of it with brute force. Just as easy to work around it I guess.
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