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!

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!!