Dumpster Ibanez, part the last

This is the second time I've written this post -- the first time blogger did a fun little switcheroo with an identically titled duplicate draft and tricked me into deleting the whole thing. If it seems badly written and confused, it's probably because I was too fed up to write it any better.

This is the last of my interminable posts about the battered Ibanez EX370 that I found in a bin. So, the story so far. I found a guitar with a busted neck. I tried to fix said neck and busted it worse. Time passed, I got married. I made new neck, glued it together and fretted it. All that remained for me to do was paint it and set it up.

I was a little nervous going into this last stage. On the one hand, I knew it was be pretty damn difficult to irredeemably wreck the guitar at this stage, but on the other, there was the issue of my rather checkered record when it comes to refinishing guitars. I lack the patience, equipment, and time to make a good job of it. I still try, but I usually cock it up. Going into this project I had tried refinishing a guitar three times and buggered it up... well, three times.

This time I was determined to do everything by the book. I sanded the neck until it was as smooth as a greased-up teflon baby, then liberally smeared it with sanding sealer. A few days later I repeated the process and left it to dry. The paint I was going to use was some matt clear lacquer I had left over from another project (I say left over – it's more that I never wanted it in the first place. I made the mistake of placing an order with Montana Cans, who are a bunch of complete fucking shysters. Go with MTN Nottingham if you're looking for spray paint -- it's good paint and they won't try and rip you off.).

While it was entirely not what I wanted for the other project, the matt lacquer was ideal for sealing up the neck. I don't like the feel of gloss lacquered or oiled necks -- too sticky under my thumb -- but I knew that if I didn't put something fairly heavy-duty on it the neck would be coated in finger-skank before I'd played my first riff. I took advantage of a late summer warm spell to get to work in my spray booth (the end of the garden) with the neck placed my my special painting cradle (I dangled the neck from the branch of a tree using a hook made out of a bent coathanger).

Much to my annoyance, I discovered that it was very good paint. I hate to give a good review to such a staggeringly unethical company* but I have to say it went on nicely, dried quickly and gave a good finish. The neck was finished within three days. I didn't take any pictures during this stage for some reason, but there wasn't really a whole lot to see.

Once the finish was completely dry I put my maker's mark on the headstock. Since Kristen did about half the work, I figured I should give her half the name, even if Hollingmore does sound like a 1950s kitchen appliance company. I'd intended to do the lettering with one of my chunky italic pens, but it wouldn't stick to the finish so I had to use a sharpie. Suffice to say, calligraphy isn't easy with a sharpie marker. It's supposed to be based on a 16th century Flemish alphabet that I can do quite well with a pen, but with a sharpie, on a awkwardly shaped block of wood, the results aren't so hot.

With that done I wired in the old pickups from my brother's guitar (see this post for how they came to be not in his guitar). Again, no pictures of this stage. I can practically do with blindfolded now (although I still periodically burn myself on the soldering iron) so it didn't strike me as novel enough to photograph.

At this point, when I was just a few meters from the finish line. It all went to shit. Well, not all of it exactly, but an important bit. You see, when I strung it up the first time I didn't really bother with all the rigmarole that goes with setting up a Floyd Rose tremolo – I just ran the strings through the machine-screw holes in the back of the saddle-blocks and left it at that. As long time readers would know, I'm really emphatically not a fan of the FR. What happened next has made me even less of a fan.

To attach a string properly you need to wedge it between a little square block of metal an the saddle-block, then tighten the whole thing up with a set screw. I did this to the first string with no problem, but when I tried to do it to the second on the string pinged out when I tried to tune it up. I put it back in and tightened it about a half-turn more than I'd tightened it before. This caused the saddle-block to shatter like a piece of porcelain.

Now, in all fairness, this isn't exactly the fault of the Floyd Rose design. ‘Original’ FR tremolos (as in ones actually made by the company) are made from machined steel, and you'd need a colossal amount of force to break them. The fact that this one broke is mostly down to it being a cheap-ass die-cast licence made copy. Still, you can make a Fender tremolo from the cheapest materials possible and it still works just fine – I know, I've played an Encore strat copy.

Still. I was annoyed. I had no spare saddles and I definitely couldn't fix the broken one. After a great deal of rummaging around on eBay I managed to find a replacement set, but they were £30 and were probably no better made than the ones that were already there. I really didn't want to spend money improving a piece of hardware that I consider to be fundamentally flawed, and that I'd never use, but at the same time I really didn't have any other choice. After about a week of procrastinating I bought the new saddles and string it up. This time it went without problems, and while the saddles are a noticeably different colour to the old ones (new gold finish vs extremely worn gold finish) they seem to work fine.

I tweaked the action a little, adjusted the intonation (which takes fucking ages) and declared it finished. I then took pictures to prove it.

It sounds nice, and plays well. I think I might make a few more very minor adjustments to it at some point (the nut could do with being filed down about 0.5mm and the fretwork is ever-so-slightly buzzy on the top-e with the action down really low) but they're not really a priority. For now I'm just going to keep it in playable condition and, well, play it.

Perhaps I'll make a serious effort to learn some jazz guitar, just because the idea of playing jazz on something with pointy horns and a Floyd Rose tickles me.

-Ben

*The whole German Montana vs Spanish Montana (MTN Color) affair is a fascinating story that I need to tell on here one day. Suffice to say it reads like a ‘big-business vs the little man’ story from a left-leaning children's TV show.

Dumpster Ibanez, Part the third

So, here I am again. Today I will tell you a tale of glue, swearing and drills.

I left off at the point where I put the neck back in the box it came in, along with all my tools and the larger offcuts (my experience the previous year taught me that you should never turn up your nose at offcuts of good wood) and took it home. I would have liked to do the rest of the project in the workshop, but sadly I only had a few days off work. I'd done all the things that had to be done in the workshop though, so it wasn't a major problem.

The first task, which had to be completed before I could do anything else, was sorting out the slightly squiffy trussrod rout. This was a time consuming but not particularly difficult process – I sat in my attic watching Doctor Who while gradually widening and straightening the rout with a selection of teensy chisels and files. While doing this I also evened out the shape of the router's little excursion into the heel of the neck. The next day I cut a handful of thin slivers from the veneer-like piece and shoved them into the unwanted rout until they filled it with no visible gaps. I then took them out, slavered them in titebond (which is so much easier to work with than gorilla glue) and jammed them back into the gap with a mallet. When dried and planed flat, you could barely see the repair. At about the same time I took another veneer-piece and glued it to the side of the heel where I'd drifted off the line during the jigsaw phase. Once trimmed and planed to the right shape, it got the neck back to the right shape.

I was pleased with myself, work could now continue.

The next stage was attaching the fretboard, which involved a great deal of persnickety measuring and minute adjustments. It also involved a lot of clamps. Like this.

The neck, held in place with three clamps attached to a big bit of scrap pine. The strange mutant in the background is a scrap of pine that I radiused with a plane and then banged frets into for practice. 

Once the neck was firmly glued in place (I kept it clamped securely for two days to be sure) I set about trimming the fretboard to the same size as the neck. It would have been quickest to do this with a saw, but I was terrified of cocking it up so close to completion, so I did it the slow but certain way – with planes and rasps. After I'd done this, I gave the neck back to Kristen so that she could drill the tuning peg holes with the big pillar-drill in her workshop. 

 The neck after I'd removed all the excess material. It was just balanced on the body for the look of the thing in the picture – I'd not actually bolted it into place yet.

It was through experiments with this mutant neck shown above that I figured out a fretting method that seemed to work pretty well. Like the old method, it was still fundamentally clawhammer based (perhaps one day I'll buy a dead-drop hammer in a fit of wild extravagance). It had, however, a few crucial differences from the old method. First of all, I was using Jescar fretwire, which comes pre-radiused (joy), rather than the flat stuff Stewmac sells. This meant that the curve of the fretwire was consistent and even. Secondly, I found a ratty looking old chopping board in the kitchen made out of a funny sort of rubbery plastic that seemed to have just the right amount of bouncy-vs-hard. This latter point sounds a little odd, but it was possibly the more important of the two developments mentioned so far. By cutting a little square of this and sticking it to the end of my hammer, I was able to knock the frets into place without marking them or exposing them to too much shock and vibration. Finally, I bought a big new pair of end-nippers which Kristen reshaped on her grinding wheel at work, fixing them so that the cutting edge was flush with the face of the nippers. This allowed me to cut the frets pretty much flush with the edge of the fretboard, eliminating the lengthy process of grinding the ends down with a file (a process which often shook frets loose). The whole process of fretting, much to my surprise, went smoothly and only took about an hour and a half.

Frets, behold their shinyness. There's only two strings on there because I was just lining up the neck at this point.

With this done I drilled the holes in the headstock for the tuning peg screws, the string trees and the neck attachment bolts. The last of these was probably the most nerve racking. I did it with a hand drill because I was paranoid about drilling through the front of fingerboard. I'm not entirely satisfied with the fit of the neck in the pocket, but it seems good enough to play. With these things done, I wired up one of the pickups and strung it up.

All these things done I gave it a very simple, cursory set up to get the strings somewhere near the fretboard (this involved shimming the neck pocket a little to increase the angle) and plugged it into my amp. I think you could probably have heard my Dr Frankenstein-style laughing from the other side of the street when I figured out that it worked. The frets were even and level, no buzzes or dead notes, the neck felt good in my hands. I gave the truss-rod a tweak and it did what it was supposed to do, correcting the ever-so-slight bow caused by putting it under tension for the first time. 

But, of course, I could not call it finished just yet. So after a few more minutes’ playing, I took the strings back off, dismantled it, and prepared for part four: finishing and set up. Do stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of this saga.

-Ben

Dumpster Ibanez, Part the Second

A few posts ago I told a tale of a little guitar that couldn't, and of my hamfisted attempts to get it working again. I will now bring things up to date.

Part one ended in the autumn of 2011, with the guitar disassembled and thoroughly buggered. It stayed that way for the next 8 months or so. I cannibalized some of its electronics (including the one nice pickup) for a refurb of my little sister's Yamaha Pacifica, and considered throwing the rest of the instrument away on more than one occasion.

I didn't entirely give up on the project though, and once the post-wedding daze had subsided I started thinking about what to do next. Considering the thorough wrecking I'd given it the previous year, I figured I had to either make a entirely new neck or throw the whole thing in the bin. Last year making a new neck would have been completely beyond the realms of possibility (there's only so much you can do with hand tools and a shitty black+decker workbench in your garden) but now I had a wife who worked in a big carpentry workshop. 

This was, I admit, bordering on underpants-gnome logic (Step 1: Wife with workshop, Step 2: ?, Step 3: Guitar Neck!) but it was enough to make me seriously consider how I'd go about building a neck. I bought a few books, read a lot of blog posts, looked into suppliers of wood and parts. I also drew up a set of blueprints for this hypothetical neck using Adobe inDesign. (I know that autocad probably would have been a more appropriate medium, but it took me three years to reach this level of proficiency with inDesign, and so I reserve the right to use it for damn near everything.)

The neck blueprint. Clicky to embiggenate.

The pale blue bit is the truss rod rout.

At about this point Kristen learned that most of her colleagues were disappearing over the summer, and that all her students would disappear also. She suggested that if I came in she could teach me how to use all the tools I'd need and help me with the guitar. In return, I'd be someone to talk to. This seemed like a good plan, so I booked a few days off during the summer holidays and bought the parts I'd need.

I still had a rosewood fingerboard left over from the previous fuckup, so all I needed was fretwire, a trussrod, and a slab of a maple. I bought them from Tonetech Luthier Supplies, who are based in the UK, meaning that there was no interminable wait this time around.


The first tool Kristen taught me to use was a handheld Jigsaw. Once I'd shown I could use it without chopping my fingers off or setting fire to the workshop, she let me loose on a big pile of scrap wood. I cut a load of practice necks from pine offcuts and a couple of dummy headstocks from plywood (I couldn't make practice necks from plywood as plywood has no grain and, therefore, can't be carved)

For the first day and a half I did absolutely nothing to the maple blank itself. I simply made batches of practice necks with the jigsaw, and then carved them with my spokeshaves and rasps. I quickly learned that pine is a tricky wood to carve. This isn't because it's tough – it's barely harder to carve than balsa wood – but rather because it's full of knots. I quickly learned that knots are effectively grain randomisers, once your spokeshave gets within about an inch of them, you have no way of knowing which way its going to go. Nonetheless, I made progress, with the necks looking increasingly neck-like as I went on.

The blanks, carved. The top two were the last ones I did before moving on.

In the afternoon of the second day I decided it was time to start work on the neck blank proper. Before I started to do any of this, however, I had to thin the blank down by about 4mm and level it out. A few trial passes with a big jackplane made it quickly apparent that planing away 4mm of rock maple would take me about a week. Canadian Maple is hard.

Kristen took it upstairs and fed it into the bandsaw. It roared into life, I hid in the corner of the room like a startled kitten (I don't like bandsaws). After an ungodly screeching noise, and a small amount of smoke, Kristen pulled the wood away from the blade, having managed to cut a groove about 2mm deep in one side. Canadian Maple is really hard.

The next day, we tried again with a new saw blade. It went gnuurrrrrrrr-whirr-squeeeeeeeee. I hid. Kristen neatly shaved off a veneer-like piece of maple and handing both bits to me. I spent a lot of the rest of the day planing and planing and planing. By the time came to go home I had a big bruise on the palm of both hands, had pulled most of the muscles in my upper body, and had big salty sweat stains on my clothes. Canadian Maple is insanely hard.

On Friday I traced my blueprint onto the now perfectly smooth surface of the neck and fired up the jigsaw. I quickly discovered that Canadian maple is hard work for a little handheld jigsaw. I had to stop on several occasions because it was overheating to the point where my hands hurt. Eventually though, I managed to cut out the neck. This was the point at which I made my first major mistakes. The first happened when I lost track of the pencil line amidst a cloud of sawdust and drifted about 1mm inside the line near the heel. The second was that I forgot that I needed to do the routing first.


I'm not sure whether it was because I'd removed a lot of material already, or if it's just because routers are evil, but this was the point at which the neck sustained another bit of ‘character’. We clamped the neck into an improvised blank made of plywood and Kristen started to carve the channel (I wasn't feeling particularly confident with the router). When she was about three quarters of the way to the heel, moving with even slowness because the wood was putting up a fight, there was a loud ‘plink’ and Kristen immediately stopped the router. It turned out that the blade had overheated and snapped from the sheer effort of cutting through the Canadian Maple of ultimate hardness. When Kristen restarted a few minutes later the replacement bit caught on some imperfection in the wood and, unnoticed by either of us, drifted off course, cutting a channel that curved about 15mm off the centerline. Luckily it chose to do this in the heel of the neck, where the wood is at its thickest and widest. I figured I could fill the gap by gluing pieces of the veneer-like offcut, which would provide the strength and density needed to hold the neck bolts in place. Having declared the neck to be fine, I set to work carving.

Carving in progress. This was about an hour's work, believe it or not. If you look very carefully, you can just about see the router’s little detour at the heel of the neck next to the clamp.

Needless to say, carving was really difficult. As with the planing earlier, it was a sweaty, palm-bruising process. I first used my microplane rasp (made in Arkansas by wizards) to rough out the curve of the neck at the headstock join and heel, then carefully shaved away layer after layer of wood with my spokeshave (taking care to go with the grain).

Looking up from the heel to the headstock. At this point I thought I was about halfway done with the carving. Hah.

After slicing away enough material that it looked like a neck, I started trying to refine the shape with a regular rasp. I discovered that this was a process akin to cutting through a steel door with a cheesegrater. It made me feel like I was doing something, but I'm not sure it if really achieved much other than to polish it up nicely. Either way, by the end of the day I had something that looked not entirely unlike a guitar neck and felt like I'd been beaten up. Canadian Maple is hard.

How it looked when I downed tools at the end of the day. The weird splodges on the headstock are a mixture of sweat and sawdust. By the end of this few days I was looking thinner and more muscly than I've ever looked in my life. Even if the guitar didn't work, I had at least learned that building guitars is a good workout.

-Ben

I was originally intending for this to be a two part affair. But now I think I'll have to make it three. Tune in some time in the next week for part three: gluing, fretting and finishing.

Dumpster Ibanez, Part the First

About two years ago, while walking back from the shops near my house, I saw a guitar headstock sticking out of a bin. Curious, I walked over and had a look. I saw a slightly battered looking 90s Ibanez, with an RG-shape body, very worn and battered looking hardware, and a snapped neck. I didn't recognize the model name on the headstock, but it was clearly a fairly low-end guitar. If it wasn't for the fact that I could see ‘Seymour Duncan’ written on the bridge pickup (SD are a maker of nice aftermarket pickups that cost about £70 each) I would have left it where it was. The neck didn't look that badly broken and I figured that, if nothing else, the electronics were worth salvaging, so I pulled it out of the bin and took it home, much to Kristen's annoyance.

The poor thing when it first arrived

 It had suffered an accident, possibly guitar flip related.

Top half is sheared along the neck join, bottom half is ragged.

When I got back to the house I cleaned it up a bit and gave it a closer examination. The break was worse than it had initially appeared; the neck and fingerboard were sheared through and the strings were the only thing holding the headstock in place. Some material had split off and been lost from the back of the neck, exposing the truss rod. The rest of the guitar was in a similarly poor state. The neck pickup was covered with a layer of gaffa tape that disguised a gaping hole in the front. The hair-thin wire of the coils had clearly been damaged, rendering the pickup useless. When I tried to dismantle the Floyd Rose tremolo I found that several of the machine screws holding the saddles in place had been cross-threaded. It took some vice-grips and a great deal of effort to get them out, and, once removed, they would not go back in.

For a guitar that probably cost no more than £200 to begin with, it was clearly too badly damaged to be worth the effort of repairing. Nonetheless, I decided to try. I'd been doing minor repairs to guitars for years and was excited by the opportunity to try my hand at the woodworking and fretting side of things.

Things didn't start well. In fact, they started pretty terribly. I'm not sure if this was entirely down to my incompetence (it was a cheap instrument, designed without much consideration for how it could be repaired), but I'm pretty sure my incompetence was the main contributing factor.

I decided that the first thing I needed to do was remove the fretboard so that I could remove the truss rod. I used lots of water and a heated palette-knife to try and ease apart the glue-join, but it would not cooperate. I had to use increasing amounts of force which eventually resulted in the fretboard disintegrating. This was probably unavoidable – to save costs, the fretboards on these instruments are very thin, with barely 1mm of clearance between the bottom of the fretwire and the underside of the board – but in retrospect I'm not sure if I actually *had* to take the fretboard off. It may have been possible to reattach the neck without doing any of that.

So, after round one I had a shredded fretboard which I would have to replace and re-fret. I wanted to teach myself how to do fretting anyway, however, so I wasn't overly bothered. Moreover, not only do I rarely every play electric guitars, I also already have one. So I wasn't in any rush. I bought two pre-cut fretboards from Stewart MacDonald (one just in case I fucked up the first one) and a few metres of fretwire.

While waiting for the fretboards to arrive, I decided to get on with the business of attaching the headstock. My plan was sound – reglue the bits I had, then square off the ragged hole in the back of the neck and plug it – but my execution was lacking. Having never really done any woodworking before, and not having any of the proper tools, I struggled to make the hole square. Each attempt to make the gap a more regular shape just made the hole bigger, until I had carved out a section that was so deep it critically weakened the neck join. After a great deal of practice with scrap wood I was able to carve out a half-decent plug for this hole, but it was never going to hold.

Gluing the neck back together.

The plug. I got a lot of practice carving wood before I scrounged a chunk of scrap maple from a guitar workshop on Denmark street. That large vertical glue join would undoubtedly fail the second strings were put on. Seeing as I buggered up the Fretwork, however, this never actually happened.


I decided to plow on anyway, however, because I figured I may as well get practice making the whole neck, even if it was never going to be usable. I glued the fretboard on (with gorilla glue – a bad choice) and had a go at fretting. Again, this wasn't something I'd ever attempted before, and I didn't have any of the right tools. I had no consistent way of bending the fretwire before I pushed it in, so the ends tended to spring out of their slots the second I turned my back. Also, as the fretwire wasn't curved to a consistent radius, it tended to be all lumpy and odd even when it was seated properly.

It didn't help, of course, that I was essentially just trying to mash the stuff into place with a clawhammer. Each fret was traumatisingly battered by the time I've managed to get it seated halfway right.

I declared the neck to be soundly and completely fucked up, and gave up.

Floyd Rose

This is heavy nerd, feel free to skip.

When I was working on Ed's guitar yesterday, I took some time to reacquiant myself with the whimpering horror of the Floyd Rose Double Locking Tremolo.

This beast was invented in the mid-1970s by a chap called Floyd Rose (bet you didn't see that one coming). He came up with it because he wanted a tremolo that you could go Jimi Hendrix-style mental with, without pulling your guitar badly out of tune. In that regard, he succeeded—when properly set-up you can do just about anything with a Floyd Rose and it won't have any serious effect on the tuning. That, in my view, is about the only way in which he succeeded.

The Floyd Rose is a wildly impractical piece of technology. In order to restring a guitar with a Floyd Rose you have to first chop the ball-ends off the strings, then clamp them into the saddles at the bridge (to do this properly you must turn the set screws so hard that you will inevitably strip quite a few allen keys over the years). Once they're all in you have to spend ages tuning the strings, letting the bridge adjust—which pulls them back out of tune again—then tuning them again. It typically takes a day or two before you actually have a guitar that is both in tune and has a balanced tremolo. If you're switching between string gauges or brands of strings it can take even longer. Once this is done, you have to clamp the strings in place at the nut, making large adjustments to tuning a fiddly and laborious process.

If you you try and change the tuning of an individual string (say switching to Drop-D tuning) then this will lower the overall tension on the tremolo, pulling all of the strings out of tune. Similarly, if you break a string, the increased tension on the other strings pulls them all out of tune, and sometimes causes more to break. The second fact makes it foolish to gig with a Floyd Rose equipped guitar unless you have at least one backup.

Ed has made several modifications to his Floyd Rose over the years (including adding extra springs and placing a block of wood under the rear of the tremolo) which essentially make it into a single-action tremolo, like the Wilkinson Tremolo on a Strat. This makes it less versatile as a tremolo unit, but makes it much, much easier to use.

Even so, the actual tremolo unit is a pretty shocking piece of design. The set screws that allow you to adjust the intonation are positioned underneath the strings, so you have to remove the strings in order to make any adjustments the intonation. You cannot raise or lower the saddles individually, which means that you can only adjust the action by tightening or loosening the bolts that anchor the unit in place. Also, the clamps that hold the strings into the bridge are positioned at a 90º angle to the string pull, which makes the strings more likely to break at that point.

All told, a guitar with a Floyd Rose Tremolo is like an old Rolls Royce where the driver's seat is not covered by the roof. It's a design feature that assumes you have staff to do everything for you, as it would be really unpleasant to do it yourself.

Tinkering

I replaced the busted barrel-jack on my Yamaha bass the other week (a relatively simple but very fiddly bit of wiring) and that reignited my urge to tinker with guitars. I can't begin round three of Ben vs. Refinishing (see these posts) until the weather improves, so the other day I took the opportunity to abduct Ed's guitar (the Stratobastard) for a quick bit of maintenance.

It's been more than three years since I made the alterations described here. Surprisingly, the electrics in the guitar seem to be holding up well—there aren't any settings that make it go dead, nor any that crackle or hiss. The only electrical issue worthy of mention is the fact that the pickup housing on the neck pickup becomes live when the pickups are switched into series. I know how to fix this, but I don't have the tools, nor the balls to do it just yet (It involves cutting the pickup casing open with a dremel-like  tool and creating separate ground wires for the casing and the signal ground). I'll sort that out one day, but it's not a pressing issue right now.

The main reason I wanted to get this guitar back on the workbench (it's a figurative workbench, obviously, as I do most of my tech work sitting on the floor in the attic) was because of a fretwork issue I noticed during its overhaul. I didn't have time to fix this problem back then, so the action has always been far too high for my tastes. Ed has never had a problem with this, but it has always bothered me. If he wants high action because he likes it that way, then that's fine, but I don't want the stratobastard to have high action because it's impossible to play otherwise.

I spent a few minutes raising and lowering the action, playing scales, and staring down the neck until I went cross eyed. Some day, I'll buy a set of relief measuring tools, but for now I'm more comfortable assessing the state of a guitar by eye and ear. What I figured out was that the guitar was suffering from a condition I call "the hump," where the fretboard has warped slightly around the neck join. It's something that happens as guitars age, and as the neck-wood settles into the join. It's another one of the reasons that I'm going off the idea of ever buying guitars that are less that 5 years old.

Ed's guitar didn't have the worst case I've ever seen, but it was bad enough to make the guitar unplayable beyond the 12th fret. The 15th fret, in particular, stood 2-3mm proud of its neighbors on the treble side. Extreme cases of the hump (the likes of which I've only ever seen on old mandolins) can only be treated by defretting the neck and planing down the fretboard, but this one was mild enough to be treated be re-profiling and re-crowning the frets (using techniques broadly similar to the ones outlined here)

While I was doing this I made a few very minor adjustments to the truss rod, to straighten out the neck a little, and fiddled around with the intonation on the tremolo. The end result is a dramatic lowering of the action, with none of the buzzing or dead notes that caused problems before, and once again, I managed to do the whole thing without injuring myself. Huzzah.

Finshed

Well, nearly.

I've put some of the hardware back, and some of the electronics have been put in place. I've run out of shielding foil, so I'll have to wait a few days before that arrives (along with the new knobs). For the moment I'm going to post up flattering pictures of my work, I'll do a proper critical examination of it soon though, because there's plenty to criticize.

Guitar Refinishing: Starting over

I've got high hopes that I'll be able to make it work this time. As you can see from the strange way that different layers showed through in different places when i sanded it down, the surface at the end of the first round wasn't exactly flat. Most of those problems seem to stem from the wonky application of the primer right back at the beginning.

Refinishing, Book 1, epilogue

It's been another week or two since I last mentioned the guitar. In that time I completed the color coat and applied the clearcoat, buffed it to a shine and admired it... Then sanded off the clearcoat and reapplied the color coat, reapplied about half the clearcoat but then ran out, got more clearcoat, sanded off and reapplied the clearcoat, patched color, and reapplied clearcoat again.

Today I sat down in the garden with the offending instrument and checked it over properly. After about an hour of staring at it in the evening sunshine I concluded that it was back to the drawing board time. This post isn't really an update on the progress, more a post-mortem. That doesn't mean I've given up, far from it, but I want to make sure that I've catalogued and understood all the ways that I cocked my first attempt before I have another go. My pride compels me to add that the following pictures make the guitar look a fair bit worse than it actually does.

Sanding
When I started I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with the guitar. I didn't know what it looked like under the paint, and I was curious to find out. Looking back, I don't regret that—it might have looked awesome under that black paint—but I do regret sanding such a large area of paint away completely. The section that was stripped completely (which can be seen in the original post) covered most of the bottom half of the guitar. More specifically it covered the rough, open end of the grain where the wood was cut. This surface proved extremely difficult to cover with primer, and there were still traces of the rough texture of the underlying wood visible even after the colorcoat had been applied. This would have been ok, but it wasn't consistent, even after the clearcoat was put on the front, it was still possible, in the right light, to see the boundaries of the area that was stripped completely.
   In future I will assume that wood covered by opaque paint is not worth seeing unless I have good reason to think otherwise. If I really have to check, then I'll sand away a small area of the guitar, preferably on the belly-cut at the back. Sanding the wood away here would let me see a cross section of the guitar's construction—whether it has laminates on the front and back, that sort of thing—without leaving an area of completely unfinished wood somewhere important.

Priming
Firstly, I didn't make any attempt to fill the dings and dents in the guitar's body before I started. This wasn't particularly to do with laziness or inexperience, I just completely forgot about it.
   The problems I encountered at this stage were the result of a combination of bad materials and bad technique. The first can of spray lacquer I used was frankly rubbish, and was completely emptied long before the guitar was ready for the color coat. Lesson learned. I'll make sure to get decent stuff next time I do that, stuff that is specifically intended for priming wood.
   As regards the technique problems, these were rather inevitable when you consider that I'd never so much as held a can of spray paint before I started this project. I've since learned the very real importance of those "thin, even coats" people talk so much about.

This image shows more problems that I'd like to admit; visible primer, cracked clearcoat, bleugh.

Color Coat
This stage actually went largely without a hitch, so I'll instead take the opportunity to talk about the more general causes of shittyness in this project. The first was that, at least at first, I had no idea how long spray paint takes to dry. The stuff I'm using is typically tacky-dry after a few minutes and completely dry to the touch after an hour or two. What I didn't realize though, was that it takes much, much longer than that to harden properly.

If you look closely at this picture you can see the indentations left when the guitar was left leaning against some fabric for a few hours, a day or two after the finish was applied.

   As the guitar has a set-neck I didn't really have anywhere I could hold the guitar that didn't involve touching the paintwork. On days when I'd been working on the neck this inevitably meant fingerprints from carrying it up to the attic at the end of the day. On the first day or two of work, I left the guitar resting on a tabletop, not realizing that this would leave all sorts of strange imprints on the finish. I figured out a precarious arrangement after a few days that left the guitar propped up using blocks resting on the fretboard and inside of the pickout rout. This allowed it to dry properly, but required a great deal of manhandling to get it in place (usually resulting in yet more fingerprints) and was quite worryingly unstable.
   Towards the end of the project I made a hook from a bent coathanger that allowed me to hold the guitar without touching it and hang it up to dry. If I'd had this from the start, I'm pretty sure things would have gone a lot better.
The second big issue was that of masking. I did the masking right at the beginning of the project and, to be quite frank, ballsed it up something horrific.

 You hear that sound? Yes, that's baby jesus crying.

   I used regular (and very old) masking tape, which didn't mask as well as I might have hoped. It didn't give a clean edge, and paint seeped through in places, forcing me to sand the paint off those areas. Worse than the failings of the masking tape, however, was the cack-handed way I put it on. Rather than a sharp, clean edge, it was a sort of meandering, rough line that veered from the edge of the frets to about a centimeter off the fretboard. I uncovered this horror after the first round of clear coating. As an experiment in desperate damage management, I tried painting over the edge of the neck completely, to hide the monstrous join, but this looked just as dumb.

 Oh, the Humanity!

Clearcoat
At first, I thought that the clearcoat went on fairly easily. The truth, however, was in the drying. Coats that looked fine when they first went on, started to look progressively more shit as each day went by. The finish on the front cracked like a playing field on a hot summer and the finish on the back developed strange deep grooves, which were probably the result of cracks forming in the layer below. Kristen suggested that these problems were caused by the coat underneath not being fully dry, which sounds right to me, given what can remember of the order in which the coats when on.

 Eeeew. Gross.

Wobbly, Wobbly.








Another big mistake was not putting enough clearcoat on. It's a simple thing, but I didn't realise that you need to put on far more than you think the instrument could possibly need. Extra care should be taken to build up the coats on the edges and on cutaways with really thin layers. Where the viscious, semi-dry paint is likely to flow away from the edge.
   If the paint is put on too thick then the hardened top layer will crack when the lower, gooey layer shifts away from the edge.

Tectonic Paint Movements

This post may sound gloomy, but I'm actually in a good mood about all this. Once I'd got over the initial frustration of having cocked it up, I've become excited about the chance to try it again, better. If this was an instrument I had a burning need to play right now, then I'd be really annoyed by this setback, but as I'm an apathetic guitarist at the best of times, so I'm not in any real rush.

Refinishing Part the second

I've been meaning to update this for a while now, but I've been busy painting, working, and playing Red Dead Redemption. I've done a lot to the guitar in the week or two that has elapsed since the last post, and I'm probably not far from finishing the job (the painting part of it anyway -- the new electrics are another job entirely) After sanding away the paint to look at the wood, I decided to do a more sensible job on the rest of the guitar.I worked with a succession of lower and lower grades of sandpaper and wet n' dry. By the end the guitar was as smooth as a teflon dolphin. In the process of sanding it down I was able to confirm something I'd noticed when I first got it.

That little black dot is the filled-in remains of a hole drilled for a left-handed strap button. This means that at some point in the last 30 years, my guitar was owned by a left handed, but not hugely picky guitarist. This is one of the things I love about getting an old guitar -- there's more mystery, I feel like a musical archaeologist.

The first coat of primer didn't go on very well. The patches of bare wood just seemed to drink it up. I ended up using the entire can without getting it anywhere near smooth enough to put the color coat on. I think the paint (made by Keen) was not very well suited to the task. I went out at the weekend and bought some more white primer -- this time by a company called "painter's choice" -- from homebase. I've never bought spray paint from a shop before. I had to ask someone to go and unlock the case they keep them in, and got eyeballed by the cashier when I went to pay.

For all that work though, it was much better paint. I had to learn a different technique for applying it, as it was much thicker and more runny than the other stuff. The first time I tried to use it I got runs and drips all over the guitar which essentially meant I had to sand away everything I did that day. I found the best way was to apply it in short sprays, adding more layers every 20 minutes or so. Over several evenings during the week I used this technique to get a good, even coat over the whole guitar. After a week of spraying the finish was nice and smooth and covered the texture of the wood effectively.
 
One thing that it didn't occur to me to do, which I will certainly do next time I'm working on a guitar, is to get some kind of woodfiller or glue and fill in all the dings and dents before I start finishing. Although the thick layer of paint has covered up the smaller dents and scratches, the big ones (which has guitar has more than its share of) are still noticeable.

Today I had a go with the green spray paint. This was the same brand as the fairly useless white primer -- so I was worried that it wouldn't be enough to cover the guitar properly. It seems these fears were unfounded though, as it covered the guitar brilliantly and fast. In fact, if rain had not forced me to bring the guitar in before it was properly dry (putting some smeary fingerprints on it in the process) I think one coat would probably have been enough.

I don't know if the weather is going to cooperate tomorrow, but if it does, I plan to get the color coat finished. I wont bother putting the clearcoat on yet though. That can wait until later in the week. I need to get some rubbing compound too, or it will not look sufficiently shiny.

The color looks a little strange in this picture, almost metallic. It's a trick of the light -- in reality the color is exactly like this, which is the look I was going for.

Refinishing

I like to tinker with my guitars, this is well known, but I'm never really done any refinishing. The closest I've come is the very silly artwork I doodled on a guitar a while ago, but that wasn't so much refinishing as messing around. I've decided to take the plunge today, after umming and erring for a while. The instrument that is getting the treatment is my 1980 ibanez Studio ST-50. It's a nice instrument, but its age is showing badly. The pots are worn and crackly; the hardware is filthy; and the finish (none more black) is covered in cracks, chips, dents, and weird blistered patches (it looks like a previous owner spilled some kind of industrial solvent on the back).

I bought a load of sandpaper, a few cans of spray paint (white primer, racing green paint, and clear laquer), and decided to have a go with it. Firstly, I had to dismantle the electrics and take off the hardware--which didn't take very long, but did leave the guitar looking very weird.

There's something really unsettling about a headstock with no tuning machines.

After that I started sanding off the paint. I'd done a fair amount of research on my guitar and figured out that it was one of the last of its model line made. It was probably cobbled together in 1980 out of parts left over from the previous year's models. While it is ostensibly an ST-50 (the entry level-model), it has a few features (the swanky tuning pegs and brass truss rod cover) that only usually featured on the more expensive models. This meant that I wasn't certain what I'd find when I stripped the paint off. I figured it was worth a look to see if it would look good with just a natural finish.

As you can see from this, the wood doesn't look that great. I'd guess it's a maple cap on the top and bottom with a core of laminated mahogany. It confirms something I'd figured out a while ago -- if a guitar has a solid opaque finish, then it's there for a reason. This guitar, with its mismatched laminates and big ugly join, would not have made the natural finish cut. That's not to say it sounds bad, or it's generally bad wood, it's just not very pretty. I did a quick test with the white primer on the back of the guitar and it doesn't seem too difficult to do (famous last words) as I'll probably only do a plain solid finish. I've run out of daylight today though (hangover stole most of the daylight hours) so I'll have to continue my experiments tomorrow.

George Fullerton

I saw today that George Fullerton has died. It's not going to be national news, but his nonetheless he was important. His name will be revered whenever two men gather over a pre-CBS stratocaster or an L-2000 and drool.

----

I've always had a great appreciation for those, like the late Mr Fullerton, who tinker away behind the scenes, who make the unglamorous innovations and get largely passed over by history. I think people like this should be celebrated, not by having their roles exaggerated as some historians tend to do, but by having their contribution noted and appreciated for what it was. People writing histories tend to simplify things, they like to create heroes, visionaries, which are then mythologized as lone geniuses. These brilliant men are held up as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, the importance of their teamwork, communication, and collaboration are left out.

When I'm writing about the history of science and technology I always try and give a mention to the other people, the people who laid the foundations or did the unglamorous bits. I always try to squeeze in people like Tommy Flowers (The Computer), Ernst Chain (Penicillin), Charlie Taylor (The Aeroplane), and Rosalind Franklin (DNA). Even though those people were, in turn, working with many other people, I feel like including at least one name in addition to the mythologized hero helps introduce at least the idea of collaboration, if not the actual extent of it.

I'm now going to go and play my bass (which is a faithful copy of a Fender-Fullerton design.)

-Ben

Fleabass

When I first started playing bass in 2002 Michael "Flea" Balzary, bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was probably my most important musical influence. It was his playing that pulled me away from the punk and pop-punk that I was listening to at that time and made me start trying to get my funk on.

His playing was also the main reason why I bought the bass that I did when I came to get my own instrument. I wanted something like a musicman stingray (his bass of choice, most of the time), but didn't have the £1,200 spare to buy one, so I bought a cheap copy. It wasn't a terrible bass, and with my dad's instruction and my own personal curiosity I was able to maintain and, to an extent, improve its playability.

This wasn't a cheap beginner bass though, if it wasn't for the fact that I'd been playing my dad's bass for 6 months I wouldn't have been willing to spend £250 on an instrument. Most people, as I'm sure you all know, don't have a gibson EB-3 laying about in a cupboard that you can play until you think you're confident enough to want an instrument of your own. Most people, when they decide that they want to play a guitar or a bass, have to wrangle the thing from skeptical parents, or their own meagre funds. The instruments you can afford or obtain with such means are not good.

I've played a lot of guitars and basses belonging to beginner musicians. With a few exceptions these instruments were usually so bad that I could barely play them. I'd usually end up sitting around fixing the action, adjusting the neck, and raising the pickups to the right height, as well as setting the tremolo and the intonation. It often took quite a while to get them to the point where someone might be reasonably expected to learn to play on them. I came across these sad instruments so often that I started to carry a set of screwdrivers, allen keys, and a little socket-spanner around in my bag when I was going to a house i'd not been before.

All this is why I was glad to see that Flea has started his own bass company; not making high-end boutique instruments, but cheap and cheerful instruments for students. Most importantly he's made the playability of the instruments the key feature. I don't know how much these things are going to cost, or if they'll be as good as they promise to be, but I hope they're a success. I think too many people get their self-esteem shat upon when they can't play an instrument they want to play, not knowing that it's just because it's shit.

They look pretty cool as well, in a painfully lurid sort of way. I think that their appearance, coupled with their simple electronics, might make them popular with grown-up musicians as well.

-Ben

bass babble

Neither interesting nor coherent, I'll probably delete it tomorrow.

This evening I was performing a nerdy experiment. It wasn’t particularly rigorous -- no blinding, no control – but the results were interesting to me. There are currently two amplifiers in my room. One is my line6 bass amp, the other is a little Roland Cube-15 guitar amp that belongs to my little sister. I dragged the guitar amp up here because no-one else was using it, and I do sometimes play the guitar. I started using it to amplify my basses a few weeks ago. I first did it because there was a huge heap of stuff on top of my bass amp, and I couldn’t be arsed to move it in order to play. I was very surprised by how good it sounded, in theory at least it should be like trying to use a tweeter as a woofer. As the weeks passed I realised that I was switching on my bass amp less and less.

Tonight I sat down and played the same phrase on my bass through one amp, then the other. I put all the controls on both amps to their neutral positions and tried that. The guitar amp sounded clear and nice, the bass amp sounded like a clock radio that has been shoved under a pillow. I then spent about an hour tweaking every control on the bass amp in every direction to try and make it sound good, with no success. I found that if I carefully adjusted all the controls and turned the volume almost all the way up, I could get a passable impersonation of the sound I was getting from the guitar amp from the bass amp. If I turned up the Roland past its lowest volume setting, however, it not only sounded much, much better than the Line6, it was louder. Like, ear-hurtingly loud. I was a little nonplussed. In theory the line6 is an 80watt amplifier; the Roland, 15. I picked them up, poked them, even changed basses a few times to see what would happen. The result remained the same. I spent about £200 on an amp that can be outclassed by the sort of stuff people buy for schoolchildren.

Looking back, I bought that amp out of a funny sort of desperation. I’d tried it in a store, and really not liked it much. Instead I ordered a Fender Bassman, I’d tried one in a store that someone else had reserved and I’d liked it. It was going to be my first good-quality piece of gear, bought with my paycheck from temp work. The Fender, however, never turned up. There were never ending distributor problems, stock shortages, and, when a store finally got one and sent it off to me, some wanker working for Citilink Couriers snatched the damn thing out of the back of a van in a depot somewhere in Kent.

A few days after I was refunded, I found out I’d got a proper job, doing something I find interesting. About a week after that I went up to Denmark street, played around with some amps, and came back with the line6 amp that is sitting next to me right now. I’ve not ever said this out loud, but I bought it because I’d sort of decided that my days of taking music seriously were over. It was small, light, and sounded better than the giant piece of crap I was playing through at the time. I didn’t hugely care for the sound even then, but it disguised the flat sound of the instruments I was playing then fairly well. I figured that seeing as I was the only one who’d be hearing me play from now on, the sound didn’t really matter.

Now, of course, I’m pissed off. I have an amp that sounds rubbish and is so pathetically underpowered that even if I were to get a call to a band, I wouldn’t be able to project over even the gentlest of drummers (and we all know that there’s no such thing). I can’t get enthused about the idea of replacing it though, as my in-head justifications for spending money on this sort of thing seemed to wear away each year I move away from the fat 17-year-old playing his dad’s bass.

-Ben

geetar

There's a little shop down a side-street near Angel station, I pass it on my way home from work everyday, that I bought a new guitar from the other day. It's one of those places, like X-Electrical in Canterbury, that sells pretty much anything that looks cool and falls into the category of 'audio-visual'. Unlike the place in canterbury though, the guy who runs it has a really good eye for bargain guitars. He buys instruments that are really nice, and often quite old, but, either because of where they were made, or their appearance, aren't likely to become expensive collectables anytime soon. He's got an especially fine collection of quite old Japanese made guitars.

I bought one of his old guitars on wednesday - a 1979 Ibanez Studio - for about the same price that a godawful 'beginners guitar' would cost me new. It looks like this.



it sounds like pretty.

-Ben

New Bass

After two week's wait, I collected my new bass from the workshop on friday afternoon. I'd been getting a little worried in those two weeks, concerned that perhaps it wasn't as wonderful an instrument as I initially thought. But no need for worry, it makes my old fretless feel and sound like a load of rubber bands on a plank of wood. It's amazing the way that a high quality instrument feels and sounds, they're just so much more lively - they respond to changes in attack much more easily and bring out subtleties in your playing that you never realised you had.


Phwoar! nice rack, etc.

-Ben

The heap

These are the guitars currently living in my room (or the spare room) at the moment.

From top to Bottom

Vintage* Acoustic Guitar - This one is mine, used to be my mum's but she traded up. Took me many hours of work with files, wrenches and sandpaper to get it playable, I recently restrung it and have started playing it again.

Encore Stratocaster Copy - Heavily Customised. I've covered the work on this beastie fairly extensively here, quite nice now.

Yamaha Pacifica - My little sister's. I don't actually know what it is doing up here to be honest. I think guitars just gravitate up here.

Hamer 'Slammer' Centaura - My most recent project, new electronics and a clean/set up. It's living here until Ed comes to pick it up.

Yamaha BB604 - My fretted Bass. Doesn't get played a huge amount at the moment, the strings are all manky and my bass amp isn't working very well.

Yamaha RBX200F - Probably made some time in the late 1980's, bought for £60 from a pawnbroker in Plymouth 2 years ago. Refitted the electronics, refinished the body, coated the fretboard.

Gibson EB-3 - Belongs to dad, lives under my bed in a case - I occasionally take it out and check that it's all in working order - probably worth more money than dad's car.

There's also a Hohner Pianet T that lives in my wardrobe, a Roland Guitar amp that sits at the end of my bed and a Giant Behringer Bass amp that sits on top of my chest of drawers.

All of which means that I don't have much room to sleep in.

-Ben

*as in the company, not the adjective - although it probably is about 10 years old.

Zen and the Art of Guitar Maintenance

Metal is a strange genre. It appeals to a peculiar side of the male psyche that wants, more than anything, to be seen to understand things that other people don’t; to possess some insightful understanding that sees the merit in what others discard. It is, essentially, an exclusive club – a shared opinion that allows those who hold it to feel like an enlightened minority, that they appreciate something special that passes lesser mortals by. I dare say that there are some people who are in it because they really like the sound of guitars distorted so much that they sound like a motorbike with a kazoo stuck over the end of the exhaust pipe, but they are rare.

This is all stuff that I’ve said before, probably better and more coherently than I have here, but I was reminded of it today whilst setting up a guitar. The guitar in question, my brother’s, is fitted with a Floyd Rose Double-Locking Tremolo – it’s a bridge that looks like this:


Ugly isn’t it.

This giant chunk of chromed brass is a fairly recent invention: A refinement (of sorts) of your standard Stratocaster Tremolo, designed in the late seventies by a man named Floyd Rose. It has its advantages – it can bend the notes up or down 3-4 semitones without pulling all your strings out of tune when you return to normal pitch – which is useful, if you like that sort of thing. They do undoubtedly have their uses, not uses I particularly approve of, but uses nonetheless.

My beef, however, is with how teeth gratingly frustrating and impractical they are to work with: They take ages to get in tune, finger bending on one string brings the pitch of all the others down, you have to take the strings off to adjust the intonation, and, worst of all, if one string breaks the change in tension pulls of the other strings out of tune, and the locking nut & bridge makes changing said string impossible to do quickly – so if you break a string on stage you are totally fucked.

In this thing, however, lies further evidence that my theories about metal are not completely wrong. These machines are impractical, cumbersome and rarely used to an extent that counterbalances their many faults, even by their admirers. Yet they are, nonetheless, loved by heavy metal guitarists. They adopt very much the same attitude to them as I’d noticed in relation to their music; that these things are perfect in some way that mere mortals can’t understand. They dismiss all the faults as mere trifles designed to put off the casual user, leaving it for the purists who really appreciate it. I assume that this means that they take this approach to everything; I expect they find the turner prize interesting, and think Finnegan’s Wake is great.

I despair.

-Ben

Ed's Guitar

For the last few days I've been working on a guitar again, not mine for a change. My brother recently acquired a Les Paul and since then his old Hamer superstrat has been gathering dust. I was given the task of making it into a blistering funkmachine - something that the Gibson, for all its merits, quite definitely isn't - and generally bringing it up to an acceptable standard for a man with expensive tastes. Which, of course, meant only the finest parts; Switchcraft jacks, CGE pots, Sprague Capacitors, Oak Switches, and a pair of Seymour Duncan Phat Cats.

The part of this process that took longest was the waiting for the parts to arrive - Royal Mail were on strike and I can't just walk down to the road to my local Guitar Technician Supply shop. Once it arrived it all moved pretty fast though. I managed to do the whole thing without burning or cutting myself once, which is a new record - I'm getting better, at one point I couldn't do a refit without gaining some new permanent scars.

I've been sitting around playing it for the last few hours now, after troubleshooting the last of the little niggling problems that always appear, and I think it's rather awesome. I've not had to opportunity to have a go with the amp cranked up to 'Obnoxious Wanker' levels but from what I've heard so far it all seems to have worked. It is indeed a face melting funkmachine, but it also has a huge array of different sounds for its owner to play with, once you figure out what .

Before!


After it had been stripped down, the cavities extended, and the new holes drilled.



And this it what it looks like finished. I cleaned the Fretboard (despite Ed's protests) and gave it a polish to get all the masking tape marks off the body.



Oof. The modifications are much more complete and elaborate than those 'spot the difference' pictures would suggest, but they were almost entirely internal. It was quite interesting work - there weren't any frustrating setbacks that caused me to pull my hair out, or faults that I couldn't understand. Most interestingly, a circuit that I, an English Lit graduate, designed, Actually Worked!

In accordance with my witty naming scheme this guitar will be called the 'Stratobastard' until Ed gives it a better name.

-Ben

Oh, and if I ever meet Floyd Rose, me and him are going to have words. Honestly, who'd design a tremolo system where you have no individual string height adjustment and you have to take the strings off to adjust the intonation? eh? A madman, that's who.