Dub's Wacky Project Guitars Thread--we're baaaaaack

[dubkitty]

i’ve been having a terrible day, but every time i see the Strat sitting on the sofa i get happy.

i’m going to look on the site for Xcentric Guitars, the folks who made the “orange Autumn Pearl” tremolo tip, and see if they have any knobs that appeal. the pickguard has a really nice pattern around the knobs that you can’t see because the knobs obscure it, but my ability to downsize is limited because the Tonestyler has a D shaft which requires a pretty solid knob to make the detents. it’s also questionable whether i’d like smaller knobs, which would have to be smaller than Strat diameter to show the design. i generally prefer larger knobs (that’s what she said) whether on pedals or guitars. smaller MXR knobs exist, so that could also be an option. tinkering with this kind of shit is basically a disease.

[dubkitty]

got paid early so i ordered the M-77T pickguard and we’ll see how that goes. not ordering anything big (or even semi-big) until another pay cycle because i have too much to pay for at the moment. time to finish off the M-77T, have a go at the Jetstar, and test the baritone Jazzmaster concept so i can decide what to do. and put the replacement cap in the Esquire.

[dubkitty]

just did another round of painting on the Jetstar. did the neck break this time which i assume will need a second coat. hoping the other areas can be, erm, finished. tune in 2 weeks from now for the next part of that story. going to put the pickups in the M-77T next, but won’t have time to wire them up.

[dubkitty]

got the replacement pickups in. surprisingly the ring mounting screws were long enough to work with one and three foam spacers respectively, and it looks like the pickup height is good.

[dubkitty]

i'm not really feeling up to working on stuff right now because other stuff is going wrong, but the next step is a second coat on the Jetstar and connecting the M-77T pickups. i may have to do extensions on the leads going to the switch because the old leads were overstretched and are now a bit wonky. but those two groups of tasks along with the M-77T pickguard will bring the M-77T home and hopefully advance the Jetstar to its end stages. i just don't have the heart to fuck with anything at the moment. the capacitor for the Esquire switch arrives today, but i don't want to deal with anything right now.

[dubkitty]

in parts news, i ordered a Gotoh “modern” bridge for the Telecaster project. i can’t use modern Fender bridges because they’re all 3-hole mounts while the Squier is 4-bolt. if i don’t like the brass block saddles i can change them for the steel Fender block saddles.

when i’m waiting for something to come into stock i keep a Chrome tab open for it so it’s easy peasy to check, and to my surprise and delight Decoboom restocked the back plate that matches the pickguard on the green Strat. of course i grabbed it. once it’s installed the Strat should be well and truly done and can be dropped from the Projects List. i can’t think of anything more i’d do other than changing knobs and switch tip.

i’m too busy with work and getting ready to go to DC for a concert tonight to do anything much, but my next order of business is to do the cap swap on the Esquire and connect everything up on the M-77T which is also perilously close to dropping off the list. i might do one more coat on the Jetstar bits if i feel lively enough for color matching. if i like the Esquire with the cap mod it’ll get an official spot in the queue, but it’s still quite possible i’ll sell it in the end.

[dubkitty]

i got a bug up my butt about filing down the CA fill along the bass side of the Jetstar fretboard, and wound up sanding down the first coat on the neck. it's actually better than it looks in the photos, which prominently display cracking in the original finish and differences in texture that are less obtrusive in person. i got it reasonably smooth with 1000 grit, but i think the other painted bits should dry longer...some of the paint on the neck wasn't quite cured. i'll mix up some more of the tinted Vintage White and do another pass on the neck presently.

to get everything smooth i wound up having to take off some of the finish along the fretboard.

here you can see the filled area along the edge of the fingerboard which is darker than the rosewood.

i'll tape off the edges of the fretboard before the next coat. it's problematic because i need to do thin coats so the paint behaves properly, but it's not really dense enough to hide the bare wood unless i gob it on. i may have to accept that i can't get a near-perfect visual result on the neck unless i come up with some primer or something.

the other areas actually look like they're pretty well covered, but as noted i'd better leave them alone for another couple of weeks (yeesh). but i'm making progress on the neck so i'm happier.

in other project news, i ordered a stock pickguard for the M-77T and it needs enough modification to work with the Firebird pickups that i'll have to order another one. i figured that might be the case, and they're not terribly expensive so i don't mind. i'll do the necessary measurements and probably send a template to PG made by Xeroxing it on the work copier and drawing in the mods. after dragging their ass for over a week Decoboom finally has the back plate for the green Strat on the way so that'll be all set soon, though i'm still mulling alternate knobs. yes, i am putting off getting out the soldering iron again and doing the cap mod on the Esquire and connecting the M-77T's pickups. excuse the fuck out of me. the Supro is still waiting for Charlie to try it out before i start knocking down walls, and i still haven't plugged in a board to test out the baritone concept. i only have so much time, and when i'm depressed like i've been lately it's hard to motivate myself.

[dubkitty]

i’m going to try to use the white CA as a sort of primer on the bare spots. we’ll see how that goes.

tried to do the cap swap on the Esquire but like the new Strat its wiring is weird, with tiny caps in odd places that made my new cap way too bassy. by the time i realized i should just rewire it to vintage spec my head hurt and i somehow managed to fuck up the switch so i called time on the wiring and moved on to setup.

i absolutely despise the traditional 3-saddle bridge. i did manage to get it intonated, but it took 2.5 hours of twiddling. oiling the fretboard now.

progress on the Tele and Esquire is on hold because i need the switch and because the Tele needs the pickups and controls. the Tele stuff is like $265 and the Esquire’s replacement body is $200. this month remains tight and it may well stretch into the first half of October, so i’m doing little things. i ordered white plastic strap buttons for the Galaxiemaster, and what should be the remaining little things for the Strat, a switch tip to match the tremolo arm tip and some alternate knobs that are 13.5 mm H x 16 mm diameter that are more knuckle-friendly than Tele knobs and should be enough smaller to show most of the engraved designs around the control pots. they also feature a nice black indicator dot.

IMG_7397.jpeg (39.36 KiB) Viewed 1933 times

i may have to ream the apertures so they’ll fit the pots, especially the Tonestyler position. my knobs are the cream ones in the photo, but i ordered white. they look chonky, but they’re actually 2.4 mm narrower and almost 5 mm shorter than a standard Tele knob! the mini dome knob v.1 is even tinier, with a diameter comparable to the long synth knobs Tom uses on Fuzzhugger boxes and many others also do e.g. Montreal Assembly. that’s too small for a 25.5” grown-up guitar.

before i try to do anything with the M-77T i need to get new soldering iron tips and a tube of solder…i almost ran out working on the Esquire. this tube lasted a loooooong time.

[dubkitty]

i’ve decided i’m sick of the merely passable soldering iron i’ve been using and don’t want to do any more wiring before i get a proper soldering station with a temperature gauge. i'm sick and tired of fighting with an inadequate piece of equipment. i suppose it’s good to move that along. the current iron has always been somewhat problematic and has gotten worse in recent weeks. since i’m lousy at it to start with, i need better tools that’ll do these things better. Becky’s like “maybe your birthday or Christmas” but i’m not going to wait till December to kill stuff off. this will probably be the next sizeable spend and will go before the Tele and Esquire stuff (not to mention everything else!). obviously this throws a huge monkey wrench in my plans. the only things that don’t require soldering are finishing the accessorizing of the green Strat, sanding and polishing diverse bits of the Galaxiemaster, doing the pickup mounts on the Double Jet, and working on the Jetstar paint, which unfortunately has to dry pretty much forever. i did find some white primer for lacquer online, and may go with that rather than the white CA which isn't nearly opaque enough. don't particularly want the rest of a 1-liter can hanging around, but unlike the Vintage White lacquer i can probably use white primer on anything getting a light finish. but i'm too broke right now to buy the station, the primer, or the foot-long cuts of various colors of pushback wiring on eBay, which i much prefer for wiring in less confined areas. i guess the Tele switch is just going to sit there and look at me...well, actually it'll go in the pocket of the gig bag the Esquire is currently chilling in, along with the other Tele parts.

i put all the guitars waiting for wiring work away, and it's unusual nowadays for me to have 5 guitars out that are good to go (Moon Blue M-75, Hopf Twisty II), only need small accessories (green Strat), need paint work (Jetstar), or just need to be play-tested (the baritone-ized Jazzmaster). i feel less guilty about the unfinished stuff when it's nicely packed away, out of sight/mind. and maybe now i'll finally test the baritone JM with effects. i do want to do it, but it'd be my most expensive project by far with three separate $300+ purchases (2d body so i can salvage an Jazzmaster out of everything, Musikraft neck, MOJO CuNiFe (boy, those intercaps are a pain to type!) pickups in JM shells with metal covers). unless i have a serious windfall that's not happening this year. i'll feel fortunate if i get the other guitars done before New Years', but i wouldn't bet on it. the Galaxiemaster will also certainly kick down to 2026 because it's the most complicated and labor-intensive single guitar in the infirmary. figuring out the pickguard layout and placement of various components will probably take several months off my life, and i'll have to get a digital caliper to get the pickup cutouts etc. just exactly perfect. but once it's ready it's gonna fuck people up...the Höfner staple sound in a denser, more solid body with better ancillary electronics, wiring, and hardware including the rather spiffy Goldo JM-style tremolo which should give me an honest German vibrato sound. looking forward to implementing the Schaller-style rotary tone selector which IMO is better than the (quite different) tone switches on some Galaxies.

and to be entirely honest, i needed something to break the months-long pattern of working on one guitar while trying to figure out 5 others. when i get over-focused on projects it keeps me from doing much else, including enjoying playing music.

[dubkitty]

the folks at Goldo have a bridge mount for archtop guitars (which would probably work anywhere) that uses the plastic strap connecting two discrete feet concept from the Gretsch-associated Melita bridge and comes with two heights of bridge studs. i may use this on the Galaxiemaster because it appears to just about fit the spacing on the Musima bridge i plan to use. this gets me out of having to drill big-ass holes for the studs which are bigger than Gibson studs. it could also work on the Electromatic Jets if i wanted to pull the Tunomatic sockets, but i don’t think i want to do that much work for what would probably be minimal gain. not sure if i’d leave the feet as-is or round them off like i did with the Bigsby aluminum bridge base on the Kondor. i think i’d need to see how it looked before deciding. it might be better to have more area on the bottom of the feet to help keep the bridge from moving around when using the tremolo.

i’m leaning back towards using the Bigsby B50. i didn’t care much for the couple of demos of the Goldo JM trem which clicked audibly when returning from down-bends, and the Bigsby just looks right. also mulling over the idea of a piezo pickup. i know that folks say noise from the tremolo would be an issue, but i don’t think i’m going to be whammy-ing my faux acoustic sound. of course this raises loads of new questions because i know nothing about piezo pickups, and i’d also need one of those loooooong aircraft drill bits to run wires from wherever the pickup goes to the JM tremolo rout which seems an ideal place to house the battery if the pickup was active. it would help a lot to know what piezos they used on modern Italia guitars which have the most convincing “acoustic” sound i’ve heard from a stock piezo on an electric guitar. anyone know anything about this?

since my electronics work is on hold i’m going to work on the Höfner neck and finish off the fingerboard. i’ll also do another round of polishing the body with the Meguiars Ultimate and then a fine polishing with the Turtle Wax compound…after the recent 2 rounds of Ultimate the finish, which looked lousy out of the box, isn’t that much worse than the finishes on the Squier Jazzmaster and Esquire and it seems to improve with each pass. it probably wouldn’t gain much to do more polishing because the multi-piece body will never be totally smooth without laborious rounds of block sanding which i ain’t gonna do. once that’s done i can start putting things together. i got some vintage white plastic strap buttons in perfect condition. i can’t mount the neck until i bung out the end of the neck cavity because the Höfner neck is 22 frets and needs that extra fraction of an inch to intonate properly. but once things start getting assembled it’ll feel more like an actual guitar.

[dubkitty]

seems like the cheap-‘n’-easy test bed for piezo pickups would be sticking a Schaller Oyster pickup on the bridge feet, or perhaps under the bridge.

[dubkitty]

really, the piezo idea is as much about doing something useful with the tremolo rout if i use the Bigsby as the utility of the piezo, which could be implemented far more easily on a Strat with a GraphTech bridge. i like my Strats as they are, though, so that would entail a third Strat.

seriously considering a brass or other metal plate to cover the trem rout. that’s not a market item, and i’m reluctant to get into metalworking, though i could probably do a good enough job. it also raises questions about how the Bigsby mount would be affected by the additional lift from the plate. or i could also put springs in there like the Vintage <edit>Vision</edit> series guitars which are meant to emulate the effect of Stratocaster tremolo springs resonating inside the body. crazy, yes, but it seems to do something in the demos.

i could also use the GraphTech tunomatic-style bridge with the Goldo bridge mount system. that actually sounds functional though i suspect clearance at the back of the bridge for the strings coming off the B50 tension bar might be an issue. in that case the trem rout might be a handy way to keep the GraphTech wiring separate from the main harness with just a lead combining all 6 saddles to a single output wire. would an archtop bridge look too weird on
a Jazzmaster? it’s times like these that make me wish i could do Photoshop in the modern era. hmmmm…

[dubkitty]

the Decoboom back plate for the Strat that matches the pickguard and the replacement Telecaster switch have arrived. i'm sticking to not doing any more soldering until i replace the current iron so the switch will go in the Esquire's gig bag pocket. i really do have to do the wiring and finish setting it up to see if that sound is enough of a keeper for me before deciding whether to get another body and transfer over the Esquire stuff or just dump stuff in the parts box. i doubt i'll have any use for more Tele stuff after my Gemini Tele is done otherwise, so it might make sense to just get a bound GFS body and then sell it off unless it insists on staying.

Xentric is still dilly-dallying around with my order of knobs for the Strat so i won't get to call it finished just yet. unfortunately this seems to be a pattern with them since the tremolo tip took like a week and a half to ship. i think it's one guy with a 3D printer making them up as orders come in rather than keeping anything at all in stock, which makes sense from that end but is just irritating from this one. i just want to know if the damn knobs work.

i played with the baritone-ized Jazzmaster over the last couple of days and am very much leaning towards doing it properly with a baritone neck. it's going to take time to pull off, though, since there's a lot of expensive shit involved in making the red JM into a baritone with WRHBs in JM shells while getting a Sonic Blue body to keep as a regular JM. so that probably ain't happening till next summer, and that's assuming i can get the rest of the stuff cleared away other than the Galaxiemaster which is going to be complicated, fiddly, and involve way too much wiring. it's not nearly as bad as it could be, though...the Höfner staple mini-ish humbuckers have loads of room in the pickup cavity and actually sit below the body's top surface when placed in the rout, and another couple of rounds of polishing the body beats the absolute crap out of the amount of sanding i thought i'd have to do.

the Double Jet is still waiting for the pickup mounts to be sorted out, which i'm not exactly excited about doing. it's not that the tasks are difficult, it's that so many people fuck up the TV Jones mounts. i probably also still have PTSD from the last time i worked on it, which drove me to quit doing projects for a good couple of years. idly thinking of trying a Melita bridge, which has hinged feet to adapt to the guitar top, but that inherently means pulling the bridge studs and filling the holes. there are some Bigsby B5 screw holes i could fill while i'm about it and i feel pretty good about filling in black finishes which the DJ is, but i kind of want to keep it as low-effort and low budget as possible for now. i can always go back and do that shit later, after the guitar is functional again.

the next time i'm out of the house i'll canvass the small specialist hobby shops here to see if i can find a reasonably-sized bottle of white primer so i don't have to order a fucking quart for the neck work on the Jetstar. from what i can tell online miniatures and model railroad people use acrylic primer and shoot lacquer over it, so if that works it'll make the rest of the Jetstar stuff tons easier, though it looks like the body and headstock stuff is pretty well covered. that's still going to sit for another week or 2 to dry more thoroughly.

seems like everything else on the list requires soldering and as such will be sitting for an indeterminate period. i think i should be able to get the soldering station with my next check, though it may wait because during the second half of the month Becky and i are going to visit Luray Caverns on the other side of the Blue Ridge and there's a Alvarez acoustic dreadnought near there on Marketplace some lady has been trying to flog for months and steadily dropping the price. it's mahogany and i'd prefer rosewood, but i really need an acoustic that's not beaten to shit like my Epiphone. i love that guitar, but it's a bit too tired to use much. the fingerboard and frets in the cowboy/folkie positions are particularly beat. the Alvy is like $185 now or something like that, and it's not likely that guitar is going to move considering that the area is quite rural. i flirted with the idea of ordering in a lawsuit Takamine or Tokai-built Cat's Eyes dreadnought, but when the tariffs dropped that went right out the window. so that could eat the soldering station money. hell, i don't know...i'm just trying to get all this shit done so i don't have to think about it any more.

[dubkitty]

the Strat knobs shipped and are projected to arrive next Monday. i could get lucky and have them arrive Saturday. i’m waiting to do beauty shots of the finished Strat till i know it’s actually done. the back plate matches the pickguard really well. it’s interesting to me that this guitar with its uber-50s design is now harking back to the 1930s with the guards and faux-tortoise knobs. i’m coming across a whole new group of odd knobs from browsing on Shopify and may have some cool discoveries to report soon.

[dubkitty]

i had a whole post about checking out the Hopf and what i need to do to get it completely sorted, but my phone battery ran out and i’m not typing it again today. no huge problems, but annoying bits where previous work complicated later work. upsides, the pickups sound great and the chonky neck is super comfortable to play despite its width and thickness, or perhaps due to its width and thickness. i’ll do a post tomorrow after putting it back together.