Burley 335: Final Touches

Got some time to spend on the 335 today, and that meant finally tackling the wiring and doing a fret job. First the wiring, which is always a little daunting for these semi-hollow builds. Thankfully i stayed with the stock mini-pots for this build and that made fitting the hardware into the sound-hole much easier. As usual, I wired up with shielded push back wire from Stewmac. This is a must if you want to minimise the noise for a semi-hollow or hollow build where no cavity exists.

Wiring harness complete and ready to be inserted.

This time I also allowed myself a generous amount of wire between pots and the output jack. As a result, the wiring harness went into the body with very little fuss - I'm getting quite adept at using the aquarium tubing to pull the controls through their holes.

With the wiring in and tap tested, it was time to turn my attention to the fretboard. I straightened the neck by adjusting the truss rod (clockwise to add back bow!) and let my notched straight edge show me when it was good. It was then on with the files to get the frets leveled and re-crowned. A pretty straightforward process all up.

Fretboard straight and ready for fret levelling.

With the frets leveled and re-dressed it was on with some Dr Ducks Axe Wax to clean it up, condition the Rosewood and generally make it look the business. I'm not sure about the nut for this build at this stage. The plastic nut that came from DIY guitars actually looks pretty good in terms of string height at the first fret, so I may run with it for the time being to see how she feels and plays. I know bone is better, but if it ain't broke and all that.

On with the Dr Ducks for a some nicely conditioned Rosewood.

And so this build is finally ready for final assembly and a test-drive. To be honest I can't wait. I think the front veneer looks killer and I really love the way semi-hollows play. I'm excited to see how this one plays, and my hopes are high that she's going to sound very sweet indeed!

335 Semi-hollow Bass: 50s Vintage Wiring - Tweaked!

In the process of creating my wiring harness for the 335 bass, I have re-examined how to go about laying out the wiring harness for a semi-hollow build so that it is both simple, and will survive the installation process. For my other semi-hollow builds (the 12 String 335 and the Les Paul Florentine) I used the following circuit. It's a Gibson 50s Vintage wiring scheme, with the independent volume mod added for good measure.

While this orientation is perfect for wiring those big arse oil-caps into small Les Paul control cavities, when you are talking about mounting in a semi-hollow body those capacitors wired "inline" between the volume and tone pots are devilishly hard to secure. You end up attaching wires to one or both ends of the capacitor legs, and then lashing this to another of the joining wires for stability. All in all, it's a hack at best!

Instead, there is actually no reason why the capacitors couldn't be mounted to the back of the tone pots instead. You see this orientation very often in Fender wiring schemes, and in other single volume / single tone configurations. It's actually a very convenient way of mounting the tone capacitors, especially for semi-hollows! Taking the wiring diagram above, it's a simple matter of shifting the capacitor from before the variable resistance in the tone circuit to "after" it instead. The result is electrically equivalent and much easier to secure and install.

In this configuration we need only piggyback the tone caps to the back of the tone pots. No additional wires need be soldered to the capacitor legs, and no lashing is required to secure the capacitor in place. It's so simple and elegant, why the hell didn't I think of it before??

Anyway, the sucker is wired up. With the volume pots at the top and tones at the bottom the wiring harness is surprisingly neat.

Les Paul Florentine: Vintage 50s Wiring Harness

Today I finally got the wiring harness done for the Les Paul Florentine. It's all but complete, although I haven't actually tested it with the pickups and switch. I *did* test each wire as it was soldered into the harness to make sure there were no shorts, so fingers crossed it should be OK!  I used all custom parts, including 500K CTS pots, orange drop caps and a Switchcraft output jack for the harness to give those GFS Dream 180 pickups no excuse to sound anything but awesome!

As far as the circuit was concerned I used the so-called 50's vintage wiring scheme, with the addition of the independent volume mod. The circuit (without the mod) is shown below. The independent volume mod simply swaps the volume pot tabs so that the input from the pickup is on the middle (swing arm) tab and the output+tone is on the outer tab.

50s Vintage Wiring Schematic for Gibson Les Pauls, 335s and so on.

It came together pretty easily, and it's a neat job if I do say so myself. This is the first time I've used 'Shielded Push-Back Wire' from Stewmac to build a wiring harness and I've gotta say that once I got used to using it, I quickly fell in love with it. So much easier to ground the shielding than the plastic coated 'Shielded Circuit Wire' from Stewmac that I have used on my last 2 hollow-body builds. You just solder the shielding straight to the back of your pots. Brilliant!

With the harness complete, did I stop to test everything before shoving it into the body? Nah! Instead I charged ahead and attempted to man-handle the harness into the body of the guitar. I really should have stopped to test everything first, but what the hell. I'll probably pay for it tomorrow. Anyway, after 5 attempts I was about to give up. The CTS pots are much higher than the stock pots that came with the kit and they would only move inside the body cavity if they were laying down just so. My 5mm aquarium pipe wasn't helping much either.

But, on the 6th attempt, i finally got it in there! I'm not sure what damage I may have done to the wiring (some jimmying of the pots was required at certain stages) but fingers crossed everything is OK. I *really* don't want to have to pull these buggers out again!!

 

With the harness in I was finally able to set my gold knobs and screw in my oval jack plate from GFS. More than a touch of awesome I reckon!

Now all there is to do is to connect the pickups and switch to the harness and heat shrink the lot. Sounds like tomorrow might see this baby completed! Fingers very very crossed!

ES175 Hollowbody - Wiring Harness Complete!

After procrastinating for several weeks over which way to approach it, today I finally completed the wiring harness for the ES175. It was a mammoth undertaking, spread over 3 days. The reason for the complexity was my choice to try a 6-way freeway switch, instead of the normal 3-way. It's pretty neat - allowing the following pickup combinations:

Lots of cool single-coil goodness is on offer, but what a sow this thing is to wire up! See what I mean?

I wired it up using a nice set of 500KOhm CTS pots, as well as orange-caps for the tone circuits. This baby should purr! I dithered a little while, wondering whether to use multi-strand shielded wire or just my plain old single-core shielded wire from Stewmac. In the end I went with the single core as it's what I have always used. I also toyed with the idea of not soldering the pickup wires directly to the switch to give me the option of swapping the pickups out in the future. In the end I decided that this wasn't a very likely scenario (given how awesome these GFS Nashville Retrotron pickups are said to be) and therefore there was no point tying myself up in knots over it. The damn circuit was complicated enough without adding more wires to the mix!

In the end the wiring harness came out OK. The harness is, well, kinda neat and hopefully wont be seen through the f-holes. I did a quick tap-test on the pickups to make sure things were working as planned (this tests pickup signals but not tone pots). Everything passes muster at the moment.

The wiring in and around the freeway switch is pretty complicated, however. Let's hope I don't break anything during installation and have to troubleshoot it. Now that would be a bitch.

Fortunately, the hollow-body promises to be a much easier installation than with the 335. I can take all the pots down through the pickup holes and there's plenty of depth to make sure the wires don't get in each others way. Here's hoping anyway. See you at the finish line!