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: Polishing Done, Hardware Installed

Well today was a big day for the Gibson Florentine. First the polishing was finished using the 'fine' and 'swirl remover' ColorTone compounds from Stewmac. The finish has come up nicely indeed. Not sure I'm going to be able to use my right arm for a couple of days, but hey - that's what it costs!

As soon as the polishing was complete it was on to the shielding of both pickup cavities using my old friend copper foil with conductive adhesive. The ground wire was added to the bridge post, the bridge post hammered home and the ground wire soldered to the bridge cavity wall. Additionally the neck and bridge cavities were joined eletrically with a second lengh of wire soldered at both ends to the cavity walls.

After the shielding was complete, it was time to install the three-way switch. The switch was soldered to some 4-core shielded cable from Stewmac and then placed inside the body using the tried and trusted 5mm aquarium pipe method. You can see how this works in the photos below.

Amazingly, the switch went in relatively easily - it only took three attempts!! Once the switch was in, I just had to get the rest of the hardware in to see what it looked like. I had to widen the hole from the bridge cavity to the outer body to accomodate all the wires, but everything fitted in the end.

I think it is looking pretty damn good, don't you? The gold hardware really sets off the cherry dye job. Anyway, just the wiring to go now. I'm planning on using 50's vintage wiring with the independent volume and treble bleed mods - just like I did with my 335 12 String build. Should sound great with these Dream 180 humbuckers from GFS!

Les Paul Florentine: Installing a Tune-o-matic Bridge

For my Les Paul Florentine project, the Pit bull ES-2T kit came with the option of a fixed or floating bridge. Since I am after a fixed tune-o-matic bridge, it was up to me to install the bugger - including finding its proper location and drilling the holes for the bridge posts. For anyone who is interested in how to do this, here are the steps I take to do a tune-o-matic bridge installation.

Step 1. Mask off the body and Extend Neck Line: To make sure your measuements and line marking doesn't impact the body of your guitar, first mask it off with painters tape. Then, using your ruler, mark lines on the tape extending the line of your neck down past the bridge pickup cavity.

 

Step 2. Measure the Scale Length & Calculate Bridge Post Position: As we all know, the bridge must be positioned correctly (witin 1-2mm) so that correct intonation can be achieved in each of the 6 strings. The correct position of the bridge posts, on both the treble and bass sides, is determined by the scale-length of the neck +- some compensation for each string that takes into account string gauge and so on.

The scale length of a guitar neck is equal to twice the distance from the fret side of the nut to the very middle of the 12th  fret. On my guitar, as on many Les Paul style kits, the distance to the 12th fret is 313mm, giving a total scale length of 626mm. Once the scale length is known, to find the position of the bridge posts it is a simple matter of consulting the Stewmac Fret Position Calculator. For a 22 fret neck with scale length 626mm and tune-o-matic bridge, Stewmac tells us that:

"From the nut to Treble Side Post should be 627.534mm, and that we should allow another 1.5mm to 3mm further on the Bass side post".


Step 3. Measure Bridge Post Position and String It Up: Once the bridge post positions are known, it is a relatively simple task to measure the distance from the nut and mark each position off on the tape (across the neck line we drew). For the bass-side post, I tend to measure into the middle of the suggested range (adding in this case 2mm to the treble side distance).

Once the posiiton is known length-wise, we need to locate the bridge posts across the body - ie. with respect to the neck and the tailpiece so that the E strings are positioned correctly up the neck. The easiest way to do this is to string the guitar up with the two E strings and pass them over the bridge (that is sitting flat on the body). If the strings are touching the frets, then washers can be used to raise the bridge off the body until the strings sit off.

The bridge is then moved side to side until the correct string placement up the neck is achieved.

Step 4. Mark the Post Holes: Once you have the position of the bridge just the way you want it, you need to mark the position of each hole ready for drilling. It is important that the correct location of the posts is maintained through this process, and the best way to ensure this is to use a set of transfer punches to mark each position.

Select a punch which is the largest possible that still fits through the hole in the bridge, and then tap lightly with a hammer to mark the center of the hole. Make sure the bridge doesn't move when you tap that first hole!

Step 5. Measure Depth and Drill Test Hole: With the locations for each post marked with the punch, you can move on to drilling the post holes. To minimise gauge-out around the edges of the holes, I recommend using a brad-point drill bit. I bought an imperial set from Stewmac and they have been my best tool investment yet. However, before you reach for the drill, you should measure the required depth of the post holes, mark this distance on the drill bit using some tape, and drill a test hole to make sure you have the correct drill bit size.

 

Step 6. Drill..!: Once you are satisfied that everything is correct, you can go ahead and drill your holes in the guitar top. Try to hold the drill as straight as possible in both directions (or better still use a drill press). Drill down to the indicated depth only and make sure all the crap has been cleaned out of the holes.

 If you use a brad-point drill bit as suggested, you should end up with nice clean post holes like mine!

Step 7. Tap in the Posts: After you've successfully drilled the post holes, all that remains is to test-fit the posts and the bridge. To do this you simply tap them in using some wood to even out the force and protect the bridge's finish.

I usually do this step on both posts simultaneously, with the bridge fitted to make sure the posts go in straight and still allow the bridge to sit astride them once fully seated. But that's just me - paranoid about everything!

And viola! There you have it - a tune-o-matic bridge fitted to your guitar with the correct placement, taking into account correct comensation and the like. Of course we have made use of expertise from those nice folks at Stewmac, but hey - no point re-inventing the wheel!

Les Paul Florentine: Bring the Bling & Second Trace Dye

Well, I changed my mind again. My gold hardware arrived today from Guitar Fetish and it looks awesome. Seeing it on the guitar with the original trace dye, it seemed obvious to me that more colour was required for this build. As you can see, there's a 335 style Trapeze Tailpiece, a gold Tune-O-matic bridge and a pair of GFS Dream 180 humbuckers with gold pickup surrounds.

And so it was back to the idea of wine red. I mean how awesome will those gold doodads look on a field of dark red! Over 2 hours I slowly sanded off the original trace dye with 240 grit, paying close attention to those pesky glue spots. 2 whole pieces of sand paper, and a little bit of my sanity later, the job was done and I couldn't wait to get a second trace dye on there to see if my sanding was complete. Here's the result..

All the glue spots are gone (hooray!) and the wine red looks great. This is a darker shade created from 80% cherry red and 20% blue Colortone dyes from Stewmac. Next step is to sand down through the grades again - 360, 400 and 600 to get the surface ready for clear coats and to take a bit of the colour back off the top. The colour will be replaced with a slightly lighter shade (95% cherry, 5% blue). Hopefully this will let the figure pop as much as possible. I can't wait to see the red with the gold!

I still need to decide on a colour for the bottom part of the guitar. I was thinking to just leave it natural with a slight tint from the Tru-Oil that is to come. Hmm.. still not undecided. I may hit it with a slight Amber dye, or a mix of Amber and Red Mahogany or even Medium Brown. I might need to do a couple of experiements to see what they look like though..

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.

Stewmac: Scraping Binding

Here's a great video from Stewmac on the best ways to scrape that pesky binding. Some great tips in here that I will definately be using when it comes time to scrape the orange ES175 beasty!