Wave guitar build project

Megii

Some other stuff I've done...

Fitted the neck bolt ferrules - I actually posted these to www.guitarbuild.co.uk, and they have ensured a very close fit, they push in fairly easily, but there are no gaps, and they would be a bit tricky to get out again!

Also thought it was as good a time as any to fit the string ferrules - I used a small hammer (carefully lol) plus cardboard and a small softwood block, to avoid damaging the ferrules:

They went in reasonably easily with some careful tapping of the hammer, but would be pretty impossible to get out again I think!

Megii

Various shots of the control wiring job:

Started by attaching all the wires needed to the volume pot/push-pull. You can see the parallel 150K resistor/0.001uF treble-bleed between a couple of the lugs - I do like these, not only because they keep the tone constant as you turn down the volume, but I like the resulting taper I get using a log/audio type pot, it's not too sudden or sensitive, but I still don't have to do a massive turn of the control to get an appreciable volume change.

Finest Russion PIO capacitor lol (I bought 20 of these from a guy in Moscow on ebay some time ago...). It's a 0.015uF value, which I find about right for me to get a good usable range on the tone control. 0.022uF always seems to go too muddy for me, and 0.047uF is just daft I find. A matter of taste though I know.

The wiring job is nearing completion. Here I have just connected the red wire to part of the shielding, and it will feed through a small hole going up under the hardtail bridge, in order to earth the bridge and strings:

 

 

Megii

My wiring diagram - not pretty, but at least I knew what I meant    :

And the completed wiring job (took me the best part of the whole day lol):

I've gone for a circuit which has a push pull on the volume and tone pots. The one on the volume taps both the neck and middle pickup - the neck (an SD Lil' 59) goes to just the inner coil, and the bridge (an old SD classic strat stack from the mid 80's) goes to just the upper coil, for a more authentic strat type of sound. Hopefully the two pickups tapped together will get a bit of stratty quackiness happening - we will see though. The bridge has no tap, and just stays on full humbucker mode all the time - it's an Artec alnico 5 rails type, not quite as heavily wound as some rails pickups (about 9.3K on my meter) and sounds quite sweet to my ears.

The push-pull on the tone control acts as a "neck-on" switch (aka the Gilmour Mod) so I can get the neck+bridge, and neck+middle+bridge pickup combinations. Spent some time this morning testing everything with my multi-meter, and all appears to be working as planned. Glad to have got this job sorted and out the way!

 

 

Megii

Forgot to put this in before, but just a shot of the 3 fitted pickups, so you can see what I'm talking about above:

And a shot of the SD classic strat stack (alnico 2 IIRC, had it decades lol), showing the stacked coils:

...It's not quite an authentic strat tone, though in isolation it might fool someone if no real strat to compare to. But I do find it to be a useful and nice-sounding pickup in it's own right.

 

Megii

Lixarto said:

Looking great

Cheers!

rpr

looking good megii-nice t see the Lil '59 in it's new home.

Can I ask you how you've grounded the pickups? i'm in the middle of rewiring my Ibanez,fairly similar to yours. i've been connected the grounds to the top of the volume pot, but it's ending up an ugly clump of solder and looks a mess. The ibanez is painted with conductive paint, so I haven't used the foil you've fitted

Megii

Actually, the wiring ducts were a bit narrow to feed all the shielded wires through to the control cavity - so given the ducts and cavities are well shielded anyway, I removed the outer insulation from the pickup wires, and just ran the wires I needed for the circuit through to the control cavity. Any wires for earthing the pickup pole-pieces or anything like that, have stayed within the pickup cavity, and are just soldered directly to a point on the cavity shielding. I've done this on a previous build, and it works fine, and also stops the wiring in the control cavity from getting too cluttered. The wires going from the ground side of the pickup coils do of course go through to the control cavity, but what I did was connect a single short wire to a point on the top of the volume/push-pull (green in the pic above),  and any other wires going to ground just were all connected to the other end of this wire, and the join covered with heat-shrink tubing. I find this is neater than the back of the volume pot method if you have quite a few wires that need to connect to ground. You can see several other (mostly green) wires connected to ground like this in the pic - the connection point, covered in heat shrink, is lying above the red wire. Hope that helps!

rpr

Cheers for that-amazingly I actually understood it, as well- may adapt some of it to avoid the mass of solder on the volume pot.

Megii

rpr said:

Cheers for that-amazingly I actually understood it, as well- may adapt some of it to avoid the mass of solder on the volume pot.

Thanks rpr - sorry that was too long an explanation, typical of me lol. Should just have said - take a short wire from the back of the volume pot, and use the other end of this to connect the wires to ground - i.e. just twist them all together, tin well with solder, and cover with heat-shrink (or tape). I find it's often neater anyhow.

Jalapeno

Great stuff - keep it coming !!!!!!

ChrisMusic

Megii said:    Thanks rpr - sorry that was too long an explanation, typical of me lol...

Why use one word where three will do, I know the problem, glad I'm not the only one  

Seriously though, a good explanation needs a thorough description.

That guitar of yours is coming along very nicely.

There is something satisfying about the colour and textural contrast between the shiny copper and that very nice ash colour.  That's going to be a nice looking instrument when you have it finished.

Megii

Thanks guys! Really I'm moving into the final stages with this build now, I just have a bit to do with the neck - i.e. profiling the nut and cutting the slots, a bit of work on the frets probably - and I will be about there tbh. The neck is the unfinished type that was popular in the early 90s, I was considering maybe finishing it with Tru Oil, but I like the smooth wood feel it has now really, so I think I'll probably just give it a wipe with a very light oil, like almond oil, and leave it at that. Hoping to get to the finished guitar this week in fact...

Megii

Just some shots of the www.guitarbuild.co.uk body, now finished, and with all the hardward fitted, and patiently waiting for work on the neck to catch up...

That last one just showing the jack socket arrangement in more detail - very happy with how this has worked out. Yesterday I got some work done on the neck - planed and re-dressed the frets, and now I just have to give them a final polish. Then some work shaping and fitting the nut, and I should be ready to assemble the guitar. A bit of set up work, and getting the nut slots cut to the right depth, and that should be it!

 

ThePrettyDamned

That is fricking cool. I love it.

I also love the wudtone finish, my jazzmaster is far from perfect but I learnt a lot for next time (push the finish right in etc).

How does the colour compare to that of a true oil one?

Love the wiring job, too. I love all of it. When's it hitting the classifieds?

Megii

ThePrettyDamned said:

That is fricking cool. I love it.

I also love the wudtone finish, my jazzmaster is far from perfect but I learnt a lot for next time (push the finish right in etc).

How does the colour compare to that of a true oil one?

Love the wiring job, too. I love all of it. When's it hitting the classifieds?

Thanks TPD, that's much appreciated, cheers. The wudtone kit has been a major success for this build I think. The finish is a little lighter, and less warm looking, than a tru oil one, just comparing to my strat (which has 11 thin coats of tru oil). I'd say they are both nice, but the wudtone seems to need fewer coats (possibly that's one reason for the lighter appearance), and does seem to have less of a warming effect on the tint. By comparison, the Tru Oil adds more of a honey kind of tint to things. I'll get a comparison shot posted of the two side by side out of interest.

Cheers for your comment on the wiring job too - all done with a cheapo £10 Maplins soldering iron lol, I just go slowly and seem to get there in the end. I'm also grateful to rpr on this forum for selling me the SD Lil 59 pickup in the neck slot - that appeared in the classifieds at just the perfect time. The guitar, as you may have guessed, will not be hitting the classifieds any time soon... 

Megii

Been doing some work on the neck - first up was a fret level and dress. I'll not bore you with the fine details, but basically I do this with a 2-foot spirit level which has an accurately milled-flat surface, and 250 grit sandpaper attached with double-sided sticky tape. Permanent marker on the fret tops to see when all of them have been reached. Then re-mark the tops of the frets, and re-profile and shape the frets with progressively finer small bits of folded wet and dry sandpaper, finishing with 0000 wire wool and then metal polish.

 

 The neck had had a previous fret job - presumably back in 1993-ish, before I bought the Starfield guitar from which it came, but this had left the fret tops with rather an abrupt flat profile. And it turns out, they weren't perfectly level anyway. So now I've got things nicer, and more of a "double-decker bus roof" profile to the frets, which is what I like - feels nice for bending, and seems to resist fret wear a little better than a more sharply rounded shape.

Megii

Another thing I've done is apply a light finish to the back of the neck. I was going to leave this unfinished, as it always had been, but the wood has some attractive figuring and flame which could be brought out, so I thought I'd have a go with the wudtone kit. In the end I've just used  4 ultra-thin coats of the wudtone base, at first smoothing between coats with 1200 grit, then moved to 0000 wire wool. I didn't want anything like a full gloss finish, but looking this morning, after a bit of buffing with an old t-shirt, I feel I have got a polished wood kind of look, which I like, so I'm calling it a day at that:

 

 

 

 

rpr

That neck is looking especially nice

Megii

Well, I went ahead and bolted the neck to the body a few days ago. And then bit of time spent getting the new bone nut shaped, the slots cut, and then the setup and intonation right, and at this point the guitar is basically finished! The nut is still held in place only by string pressure, and the truss cover is fixed with double-sided sticky lol, but the guitar is playing great, and I do have a few pics which I took on Tuesday to show you - these aren't quite the best, as the daylight was gone by the time I took them. When we get a decent day I'll take some hopefully better ones, but just for now these will do...

This is the lightest-weight solidbody guitar I own, and in fact I think about the lightest I've come across - I don't know where www.guitarbuild.co.uk get their swamp ash from, but it's amazingly good stuff, and I must thank them for picking me such a lovely bit of wood, and then their craftsmanship in making the guitar body - this really has elevated this project to another level I think. To play acoustically, the guitar sounds really lively and chime-y, and actually quite loud. Lots of air around the notes and plenty of high end presence. Their isn't a dead spot anywhere on the fingerboard either, and overall the response is remarkably even. This all translates into some great sounds amplified - I've only used clean sounds so far (that's kind of my main thing) but the pickup combination and switching system is working well - it's great to be able to mix in the Fender-ish sounds of the middle pickup with the bridge and neck humbuckers. I think the one thing I may change at some point is the truss rod and control cavity covers - I like the dark pearloid, but I'm not sure it's quite right, so I may make some other ones using some rosewood or ebony veneer. But for now I'm having too much fun playing the guitar! Hope to get some sound clips done at some point, and perhaps even a video clip. And cheers for following the thread and for your support folks, it's been appreciated!

 

 

monquixote

Superb work. 

My hat is off to you.