ES175 Hollowbody - It's a Psychobilly Freakout!

Well, I finally finished the orange ES175 Psychobilly beast today. It came out pretty damn nice all told. I made a couple of schoolboy errors right at the end there - scoring the headstock with the nut file - but nothing the truss rod cover won't hide. The flame maple has popped very nicely and the orange colour looks great.

The GFS Retrotron Nashville pickups are clear and twangy (remarkably so) giving the guitar a real rockabilly sound. Wailing on the B70 also sounds awesome, and with the overdrive cranked these pickups really are the business, especially in single-coil mode. The headstock is also nice, with the faux inlay flowers working quite well with the overall look of the guitar.

The freeway switch works well, and both humbucker and single coil options sound great. When you hit the overdrive those single coils sound especially sweet! Another great kit from RM Olson that has turned out better than I ever expected. Anyway, enough from me - I'm going off to play the mother.

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!

Siena's Stratocaster - It's Finished!

I finally got the stratocaster polished and assembled today. Gotta say it looks awesome. I was able to achieve a mirror finish using my Colortone polishing compounds, and since i did a mock build right at the beginning of the project, everything went together very easily without any mishaps or scratches.

After adding some copper foil to overlap the edges of the pickup cavity (so it could contact the shielding on the back of the pickguard), the only thing left to do in terms of electrics was to ground the cavity shielding to the back of the volume pot, solder the ground wire to the back of the tremolo hook, and solder the output jack. I had a few tense moments during which the output jack kept grounding out, but a bit of heat-shrink insulation sorted it out.

Despite being the one of the cheapest kits on the market, this strat plays really nicely and sounds oh-so sweet. The full range of strat tones are there, and it was made to cry the blues. This build was for my niece Siena, and I gotta say I will be sad to see it go. It looks so nice hanging on my wall right now! Obviously the thing to do is build one for myself. Yes. I must. The colour in real life is a lot more aqua than it appears in the photos. It is weird how much the camera's flash brings out the green, but if i don't use the flash the colour looks blue!

If you've been thinking of building a kit, then the Stratocaster kit from your online supplier of choice is a great place to start. These kits are cheap, there's minimal wiring to be done, and the finished product looks good, sounds good, and is a pleasure to play. Come on, you know you want to!

Rock on. \m/ \m/

Siena's Stratocaster - Cavity Shielding

After leaving the guitar a few days to cure, I got the cavity shielding done today on Siena's stratocaster. It was quite a big job - that swimming pool under the strat scratch plate is a doozy. After testing Stewmac's shielding paint and finding it wanting, I fell back to using good old copper foil with conductive adhesive - the exact same stuff that I used for the back of the scratch plate.

Once both the swimming pool and the output jack cavity had been lined top to bottom in foil, i ran a wire between the two sections and soldered it in place to make sure there was a conductive bridge between them. The wire is held in place against the wall of the cavity with another piece of conductive foil. This should hopefully keep it out of harms way.

I'm still not quite finished with the copper foil. I still have to add tape around the top edge of both cavities so that they can contact the scratch plate/output jack cover to create a gap-free faraday cage. I'm going to wait until the final polishing has been done on the body first though, since the foil will just collect the polishing compound and generally get in the way.

ES175 Hollowbody - The Hardware is Here!

Today I received the hardware for my ES175 build. The excitement is really building now - you can see how this beast is going to come together. I have a Bigsby B70, Bigsby small bridge, and a set of Nashville Retrotron pickups from Guitar Fetish. I'm considering going to chrome knobs as well - just like Gretsch's Orange 6120. What do you guys think of the choice? It isn't Gibson standard I know, but I think it looks awesome with the orange.

I think that this bad boy is really looking the business now. This is going to be one psychobilly beast! The chrome humbucker surrounds and the Bigsby bridge need a little bending to more closely fit the archtop (see the gaps?) but that should be a reasonably straightforward fix. I have only applied the Medium Stewmac ColorTone Polishing Compound to the Tru-Oil at the moment (after wet-sanding to 2000 grit), so that leaves Fine and Swirl Remover to go before I can put this baby together. Oh, and there's the small matter of a wiring harness to build. I better get rubbing and soldering!!

Evaluation: Stewmac Shielding Paint

So, how many coats of Stewmac Shielding Paint does it take to create a decent shield for your guitar cavities? Good question. Stewmac say to use at least 3 coats of paint, and there's a decent number of people leaving glowing reviews of the product on their web-site. Well, fair enough. But personally, I have my doubts. Hey, all props to Stewmac - their products are of a consistently high quality, a lot of thought goes into them, and many world-class luthiers swear by them.

However, the way I like to wire my guitars is to chain the cavity as part of the ground wire from the bridge to the output. For this to work effectively, a very low resistance is required for this ground connection, and that includes the resistance introduced by the cavity shielding.

So I set up a little experiment to see the effect of incrementally building up layers of shielding paint on the resistance of the shield. Resistance measurements were taken on a square of untreated pine, using a multimeter with probes separated by a distance of approximately 8cm.

The results are given below. As you can see, the resistance decreases as the number of coats increases (as expected). However what is interesting is that the decrease is logarithmic, with each coat having less and less of a cumulative effect.

Remember, this is over a distance of just 8cm. This is similar to the diameter of a Les Paul control cavity, but nowhere near the maximum diameter of the Stratocaster cavity. With the cavity shield wired in series to my ground wire, I would expect a resistance of less than an Ohm anywhere along the ground. Unfortunately (at least for my purposes) the Stewmac paint does not seem to fit the bill. When shielding my current Stratocaster project, looks like I'll stick with adhesive copper foil.

Siena's Stratocaster - Clearcoats & Polishing

Finally finished the Wudtone clear coats a week ago and have been waiting (im)patiently for the finish to cure. Ok, so I waited a week. A month would have been better, but hey, who can wait that long?? Anyway after 6 coats of clear the body was looking pretty good. There were a few subtle streaks in the clear finish (I probably put it on too thick) but in general it set strong, hard and flat. The finish wasn't a 'mirror' finish by any stretch but it was, um, shiny. From what I've read this is not uncommon with Wudtone gloss finishes - you get some shine but more work is required to buff it out. Not a problem! With my trusty Stewmac ColorTone Polishing Compounds to hand, I set to work.

I successively applied the Medium, Fine and Swirl Remover to the body using good old elbow-grease and a piece of old t-shirt. My shoulders were aching (god) by the end, but the result was worth it. The finish is quite a deal better than the one I started with. Ok, I admit - it's mirror-bloody-awesome!

The next step is to add a coating of poly to the body. To be honest, I'm pretty happy with the finish as it is, but a few coats of poly will protect the finish a lot better during it's life to come. As I found with Eben's flaming monster, you can't have enough protection on a kid's guitar. It's hard to get a guitar through the doorway when it's on the strap and you've got a peanut butter sandwich in one hand and a laptop in the other. It's basic physics.