Solid Body PRS: Shredder's are Go!

Well, she is all put together and she looks amazing. Today I received my CTS 500K pots and Sprague Orange Drop capacitor in the mail and they went straight into the control cavity. From there it was a relatively painless job to get the rest of the wiring soldered in and the Switchcraft jack with stylish oval jackplate installed.

I really love how this build has ended up, from the beautiful flame maple veneer to the Wudtone Vintage Yellow neck, from the art-deco trapeze tailpiece to the jet black headstock. Of course the bird inlay stickers are the icing on the cake.

I wish I was skilled enough to add *real* fretboard inlay to my bulds, but at the moment the stickers will have to do. I've done a few bends over them and they seem to be staying in place, although I haven't got any Dr Ducks Axe Wax on there yet!

Even the basswood body came up very nicely with the Colortone dye and Tru-Oil finish. I was a bit disappointed with the final colour (as the original turquoise went green under the influence of the Tru-Oil) but that's a lesson learned. With my next build I'm going to try blue Colortone dye with just Acrylic Clear over the top. We'll see how much chatoyance we achieve without the Tru-Oil..

Anyway, I've managed to get quite a low action on this baby and she plays like a dream. The GFS Surf-90 pickups sound really nice - a good vintage growl - and they sound really nice both clean and through the overdrive. It's not too heavy, and is very balanced on the strap. I'll be shredding this bad boy (if you can call what I do shredding ;) ) for the next few weeks no doubt!!

Les Paul Florentine: Sound Demo

OK, so for those of you interested in how this beat sounds with the semi-hollow body and the GFS Dream 180 pickups, I have done a quick sound demo. Please excuse the crap playing. The guitar is being played through a Fender Reverb amplifier with no additional pedals or effects other than those provided by the amp itself.


In addition to the Dream 180s, I have added a bone nut, switchcraft jack and 3-way switch, CTS pots and orange-drop caps. The entire demo is with the tone all the way up.

I gotta say, I love the way this baby sounds. Quite a large tonal range to play with, and the light body fells great in the hands. It looks so awesome, and sounds so good, I'm sorely tempted to make myself another one!

I've still got the custom truss-rod cover to go before I call this one completely finished. Just waiting on some supplies from eBay!! 

Les Paul Florentine: All Soldered Up

With new heat shrink in hand, today I soldered the pickups and switch connections to the wiring harness. Viola! There were no issues at all with the wiring harness, despite the violence metered out to it at times yesterday in my attempts to get it seated properly.

Now this baby makes some serious noise! There's a lot of wire in the cavity (if you look from the right direction you can see it) but who's worried about that? I'm not about to fool with it at this stage. I guess I *may* go back and trim the wires up at a later date, but who am I kidding?

I still have a couple of things to do before I can call this build finished. I have a full fret level and re-dress to do. Also, I need to create a bone nut for this baby. I have ordered a new tool from Stewmac - the 'Safe Slot Nut Guard' so I'll wait for that to arrive before I get started on the bone blank. I also need a truss-rod cover that is fitting for this baby. I am thinking of a hand-cut cream perloid cover, but I'll have to find the right pickguard material. Sounds like i have some ebay trolling to do!

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 - 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!

12 String 335 - Wiring It Up

Finally got to installing the wiring harness on my 12 string 335 today, and let me tell you it was a mammoth effort. Anyone who has tried to do this will tell you that it's a bugger of a job to get a set of connected pots through the F-hole and into place with anything less than a childish tantrum or two.

 

In the end I sucessfully used the "fish-tank 5mm pipe" method to complete the task. This involves threading pipe through the holes and onto the tops of the pots (and output jack) and then drawing them carefully through the body until they are seated and can be affixed. It takes alot of fiddling as the wires can easily become tangled or trapped between pots and the guitar body, and the pipe can be easily detached from the pots, but finally after 5 attepts and re-starts the components were seated and finger-tightened - job done!

 

All that was left to do was to add the glorious gold top-hat knobs from Stewmac and then it was off to the ball Cinderella.

12 String 335 - Polishing and Shielding

Great progress today - i *finally* got the polishing finished on my 335 12 string, and I also managed to shield the pickup cavities ready to receive their glorious GFS Surf 90s!

I started the polishing process after having wet-sanding with 1500 grit paper and applying a final coat of tru-oil thinned to 50% with turps. Polishing proceeded in 4 stages, with the first stage being a wet-sand with 2000 grit wet-and-dry using boiled linseed oil as the lubricant. I wet-sanded until the surface felt smooth and sanding marks covered the majority of the surface. The surface wasn't as dull as it probably should have been, but this wasn't unexpected given that I didn't leave all my wet-sanding until the last coat of Tru-oil was applied.

After the 2000 grade wet-sand, I then applied sucessive Stewmac polishing compounds - starting with Medium, then moving to Fine and Swirl Remover to remove the sanding scratches and bring out the shine.

I applied each successive compound using my electric drill and some small (3cm) foam polishing pads I purchased from Aussie site polish-up.com.au.  The shine that resulted was surprising, with the Tru-oil displaying a satisfyingly reflective gloss finish, and a deep translucency that unfortunately shows up every little mistake I made when applying each layer of oil. The flame maple has really popped, and the 3d or "chatoyance" effect as you move around the guitar is fantastic. In short, I'm very happy with how the finish has turned out!

With polishing complete, it was time to turn my attention to preparing the guitar for wiring - notably, shielding the pickup cavities with some dual-sided conductive copper foil. This stuff is great - it comes with stickum on the back and simply lays down like tape (if a little harder to handle). Each strip lays over the strip next to it and the whole thing forms a wonderfully conductive sheet (resistance is effectively negligable).

"chatoyance"

You can even solder onto it! I was able to easily solder wire from the neck cavity to the bridge cavity without any trouble at all. When the bridge is finally installed, i will be able to solder the bridge ground wire to the shielding around the bridge pickup,  and then run another wire from the shielding out to the wiring harness. Exciting times ahead!

12 String 335 - Vintage 50s Wiring Harness

I got the wiring harness for the 335 wired up today based on the "Vintage 50s Wiring" scheme used by Gibson in the (unsurprisingly) 50s and 60s. This wiring scheme attaches the tone capacitor (and therefore tone pot) to the output of the volume pot rather than the input as is the case for so-called "Gibson Modern Wiring" that is used in all 335, Les Pauls and SGs today.

I'm hoping that this wiring scheme, in combination with my GFS Surf-90 pickups, will lend the guitar a very 50s jangly sound.

Everything went together fairly easily using 500K CTS pots and 0.022 uF orange caps from Stewmac. Because my push-pull CTS pots wont fit through the f-hole in the 335 body, my planned series/parallel and coil tap modifications had to be scrapped for this build. Hopefully in a later build I will be able to explore the plethora of wiring modification possibilities.

At present I satisfied myself with a simple modification to the 50s Vintage wiring scheme to allow the volume pots to operate independently. The problem with both 50s Vintage and Modern wiring is that when both pickups are selected, turning one one of the pickup volume pots to zero grounds out the entire signal from the 3-way switch (including any signal generated from the other pickup). A simple modification swaps the volume pot input and output lugs, placing the pickup input wire onto the pot's swing arm.  When the pot is turned to zero, only the hot wire from the pickup in question is grounded rather than the whole circuit, allowing the other pickup to continue to supply signal to the 3-way switch as normal.

A second simple modification I am considering is the addition of a "treble-bleed" circuit to each of the volume pots so that the high-end jangle is not muddied as the volume is turned down. This simple circuit involves a resistor and capacitor wired in parallel across the volume pot "hot path" to allow high signal frequencies to bypass the increasing resistance as the volume is turned down.

As the pot is turned and the resistance increases, the resulting signal, while attentuated for the majority of the frequency range, is not reduced for the higher frequencies. These higher frequencies stay in the signal and the resulting output retains the high jangly tones even as the volume is rolled off.