#FINISHED#sinbaadi's tele novice build thread

ThePrettyDamned

Nice one. Looking pretty fantastic, looks nice and glossy, and I love the blue colour. Really nice.

sinbaadi

Okay, first wiring hurdle encountered. The wires I have are not the ones in the pictures of the instructions, and I've watched videos with different things done slightly differently which doesn't help.
I have red and black from bridge.
White and black from neck.
White red and black from tone.

The tone ones I'm okay with, ish, red and white to input jack, black soldered onto tail piece? That confuses me a little.

The red and white from the pups should soldered to the tone switch casing apparently, and the blacks to the respective little holes, bridging the two outer holes.

A little reassurance would be great. The wiring diagram is useless, it has one red wire from each pup., that's it.

Edit:  It would appear that they have updated their pdf.  So the wiring diagram is more helpful now, although the wording hasn't changed.  

http://www.gear4music.com/media/100224/download_100224.pdf

"Take the black and red wires from the bridge pickup.  The black wire should be soldered to the outer two holes on the green PCB on the Control Panel (3).  The red wire should be soldered to the point on the edge of the selector switch casing.  This should be repeated on the opposite side of the selector switch with the white and black wires from the neck pickup (the white replacing the red)."

The point on the edge of the selector switch casing?  Black to the outer holes of the switch?  Confusing!

Ok, I'm going to ignore the blurb, solder the two hot wires (the red one and the white one from the pickups I'm assuming, despite that paragraph) to the outer two holes on the selector switch, solder the two ground pup wires to the back of the Tone pot, the Tone ground to the back of the bridge, and the two remaining to the jack.

sinbaadi

And how, pray tell, does one solder a wire to the bottom of the bridge, without that wire making the bridge rock and roll like a sunuva?

sinbaadi

Error

WezV

Don't. You can just wedge the wire between bridge and body.

You can also cut it off altogether if you want as the bridge is already grounded through the pickup baseplate and screws. I did that for the test fit without any noise issues

sinbaadi

Thanks Wez, I went for the tucked under option.  Once I'd decided what to solder it didn't take me long.  To my surprise the output ( not input duh) was the trickiest to solder, the switch soldering was relatively simple.

It's all together now anyway.

Just the string tree things to put on here.  One down side to a cheap kit may be the cheap screws with cheese heads.  I had to find a replacement for one when I stripped the head halfway in, cue much swearing.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2EimGETSxWBZTJQbmpjLWxldGc/edit?usp=sharing

Compensated brass saddles.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2EimGETSxWBYllReHNQSm1DNnM/edit?usp=sharing

The back.  I dislike the plain plate more than I thought I would.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2EimGETSxWBV3VuNDB2Rzgzc0E/edit?usp=sharing

One with my little Blackstar amp

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2EimGETSxWBZTVTanAxRGFhREE/edit?usp=sharing

And one with his older much more handsome sibling

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2EimGETSxWBSy1ETkd2S29IUE0/edit?usp=sharing

It plays really quite well.  It's holding tune now, and there's no fret buzz, the action is nice and the pickups are good, especially the neck and there's very little buzz/hum.  Intonation is ok, a bit of a work in progress, but I'm really happy with the nut and the frets.  I think a bit more tru-oil on the back of the neck and it will be just right.

What lets it down, to be honest, is the finish.  There are patches where it makes me cringe when the light catches it.  It looks great from a distance (although I think I'll slim down the headstock a bit, soon), but I decided to draw a line, and in retrospect I should have kept working on the finish for another few days.  It's not stopping me enjoying the guitar too much though, I'm pretty chuffed with it to be fair

I'll try and record some of my crap playing and post a clip or video or something.

Thanks all for the help and support.

PS:  We should have a Fretboard headstock emblem contest!

WezV

well done!   it looks really good and I am glad the fretwork worked out well for you

imalone

Cool! You're making the rest of us look bad though...
Hand finishing is another thing that probably improves with practice, having a bit of a sanding nightmare at the minute myself.

Andyjr1515

That looks splendid, @sinbaadi ! The back looks particularly scrumptious, plain plate or not! Andy

sinbaadi

Thankyou.  

Wez, your tutorial/walk-through for the fret and nut work was as good as any I've seen - that's probably the best work on the guitar tbh - thanks again.  It's like some of the authors of these things want it to seem as complicated as possible, you made it simple without dumbing it down or patronising.

I'm not sure about making anybody look bad .  It seems like everyone here has added some massive steps to the process (Wez had basically got a playing guitar before my kit even arrived, and then decided to turn it into a salad bowl for some reason! ).  You're all doing something above the basic paint and bolt it together stuff.

I'm keen to do it again.  It has been a lot of fun, and now I have a basic but broad ranging guitar tool kit which I should put to use.  I have an old Peavey Raptor which I'm going to have a mess about with, and I might actually swap the pups in my "proper guitar" finally.

WezV

I would consider adding a shim to the neck pocket to angle the neck back a touch.  this will enable you to raise those saddles up a bit more.  It will give better downward force on the bridge which is important on a toploader, and it will also feel comfier once those height adjusters are not so prominent

It won't need much more than a strip of thin card

sinbaadi

Aha, I see what you're saying.  You don't mean to the entire neck pocket, only the lower half of it?

Assuming you're speaking in reference to the picture of the bridge, it isn't set quite like that now, they are relatively raised, but you may still have a point.

How soon can I expect any required truss rod adjustment to make itself known?  I'd loosened it a bit for the fret work, and basically just undid that when I strung it, so presumably it may need further tightening.

imalone

I find small adjustments settle themselves out over a half hour or so. Maybe faster than that, but I've never been in enough of a hurry to find out.
This is my fairly amateur view, so take WezV's advice over mine, but you want fairly level action down the neck, though can afford a little higher further up towards the higher numbered frets. That means nut the right height (since you need unacceptably big amounts of tilt or bow to change the action at frets 1-3), neck fairly straight or slightly bowed and bridge saddles at the right height.
However there's only a certain amount of adjustment you can make at the saddles. If you think of the neck as a straight line then the height of the saddles, as far as string action goes, is the height above or below that line, not the actual body of the guitar. So if the bridge saddles have to sit really high or low (or can't even get high or low enough), then you can change that line by shimming a little to tilt the neck, and a really small change in height at the bottom or top of the pocket will change the height of the line above the bridge a lot.
And yes, the lower half to lift the bridge up. When I've done it I've taken a strip of card and put holes in it to put the neck screws through, which stops it shifting while you tighten it (and hopefully also gets the best possible compression on the shim itself). Think the advice is to use a fairly thin strip and you don't need thick card.

sinbaadi

I think the truss-rod is fine now, I'm not going to take the neck off to make the shim adjustment just now, I've gotten the guitar to a point where (for me) it's a lot of fun to play with no annoying niggles, so for now I'm content.  The saddles are all much higher now than in the pic I posted though.

Intonation took a bit of fiddling.  I realised when comparing old with new in a "What the heck is going on?" way that the saddles I'd put on had significantly shorter screws than the stock items, and I was at the limit with flat 12th frets.  Swapped them back when I realised the screws are the same thread size, used a little of the extra adjustment range, and it's perfect.  (I feel like I'm leaving myself open to a "but you haven't considered x y or z comment with a statement like that , I welcome it should there be such an issue.  I considered the angle of attack at the string holes, and how the further the saddles are from those points the less the angle becomes, so perhaps it's not ideal).

I'll take a picture of the bridge as it is now....might make it simpler.

Also had my first look at pickup height adjustment (not really something I thought would be a big deal, but again something which I think some people like to make seem incredibly complex and difficult, and which might be on some level, but in reality is quite basic). I love the neck pickup on it.  Quite raw/raucous.  Not sure it's particularly "tele" but I do really like it with the gain turned up on an OD channel.

Also I realised the scratch plate had a second protective film layer on it!  Yay.  And now its smooth piano black finish makes the rest of the body look even worse! Booo. 

Vid/clip still incoming....eventually.

WezV

yeah, i had to do the same thing with the screws - forgot to mention that

sinbaadi

So a couple of weeks into operation of the guitar a few things have come to light.

1.  It looks pretty nice in the sunshine.

2.  I figured out how to embed images from Drive.

3.  The way the font changes at random on this forum is a mystery to me.

4.  The saddles are not ridiculously low, but I may still shim the neck when I do some work soon.  (You can also see the myriad finish flaws here)

5.  It really needs new tuners.  They're terrible, and when I fit some I'm going to re-style the headstock too and get the wood a bit darker (I may shim the neck pocket whilst that is happening) since it will be easier with the neck off the guitar.

Andyjr1515

Hi, @sinbaadi

It actually looks stupendous in the sunshine  

And yes, the tuners are not great.  Tish, tish...what were they thinking 

)

imalone

Nice stuff, I like the depth the finish seems to have. The great thing about the tuners is you can replace them with almost anything and be really happy about the improvement... most of the UK guitar parts sites seem to do decent hardware for not much money these days.

WezV

that really does look awesome

Deadman

Good effort!