Kiwi

Of course. I bought some Dip Your Car pearlescent white effect coat last night. Also some blue flourescent powder to play around with as an experiment too. I've also found a decent supplier of aerosol spray can solid white for the base coat. But for the pearl and flourescent powder, I'm going to have to find a delivery system that isn't paint in a can based. There are some disposable systems that use ompressed air in a can with a small paint jar which might be worth looking at. Failing that, a local body shop it is. I'm also going to have to get some tools - a rasp, orbital sander, a finger plane, scrapers and a work bench of some description to hold the whole lot steady as I'm working.

Yeah CA sticks to anything with humidity including skin. I have super glue remover for small spots but I'm probably going to flood the wood with it from a half litre bottle and push it around with a sponge brush before the first coat soaks in completely. It shouldn't dry immediately but definitely an outside job, as you say. Nice job!

I couldn't find a fabricator in China who was willing to make less than six bodies. So, ironically, I'm working with a new luthier in Canada called Rosche Guitars. You might already know him on BC as Chopthebass. Getting the measurements into CAD for the bridge proved very complicated. It wasn't possible to measure how the front and rear bridge routs lined up without using the manufacturers routing templates. This was important because the bridge locks itself in place with the vibrato arm anchoring into a special backplate. So Ian and I agreed that sending the bridge and neck was the best solution. The neck and bridge are packed to send. Just waiting for the pickups to arrive. I'll be carving/scraping the top myself and sealing with CA Not sure how to finish yet, I will cross that bridge when I come to it. Maybe I can find a friendly paint shop somewhere or I'll use aerosol cans. I did have pearl white in mind though, or maybe a metallic ice blue.

The customised guitar low pass filters arrived today from Lustihand. I was surprised at how compact they are!  A set of gold locking tuners arrived last week for about 16 quid and a set of solid aluminum knobs in black are also on their way. The CAD drawing for the body is also done after a lot of reviewing and translation. I'm currently talking to fabricators about a build price.

We have a similar floor...

Today I ordered a version of the dual low pass filter by Lustihand that has been customised for guitar. After a bit of research we identified that the Alembic sweep filters used on the Aria went from 350Hz - 6Khz. I did a spot of investigation with my EMG strat and a parametric eq and that chime setting seems to need boost around 5KHz. The filters I've ordered will match the same (custom order) and there will be the same 9dB of boost that goes into the bass circuits. I may modify this later if it proves to be too noisy. I've also revised the circuit diagram because the output from the low pass filter is active rather than passive. So one of the changes will be the replacement of the blend pot with two inputs from the pickup selector into the summing amplifier before it reaches the integrated volume. I also have some 2 pole 6 position rotary selector switches so that just leaves tuners and knobs. I can't seem to find a chickenhead knob anywhere on the Chinese e-commerce sites. Plenty of oven knobs though...

Yes I had a Guitarist mag when they ran the fold out posters which featured this guitar one issue and there was no wood in it's construction - everything was 100% lucite. Nile has said on FB that his was made from perspex by some small (at the time) operation called "Guitarman" that operated out of a music store on 48th street NYC. Bernard actually had a matching bass which is in Nile's possession now:

I am! I spent 1990 in fine art school where I was subject to alt rock constantly by my thoughtful classmates. Over many months I gradually learned to develop a total loathing of it and, funnily enough, of fine art school also. Detachable Penis by King Missile was tolerable only because it was slightly interesting. I like Simple Minds, are they cool? I wasn't into the new wave thing although I'll reluctantly confess to having owned a pirate shirt at one point...without lacey frills [ahem]. But those days were all bass, I didn't really get serious about guitar until about maybe 7 years ago. In 1987 (I turned 17 then) had a term of paid bass lessons in September and my first lesson was a couple of days after Jaco died. My bass teacher showed me the newspaper clipping, and I didn't know who he was. So we did a lesson looking at Portrait of Tracy and he showed me how to play a few lines of Donna Lee before Mark King took over my interest for the next few years. Before then the first song I'd ever learned was New Years Day by U2 but that wasn't on guitar. So, on reflection, at 16 I was only just getting serious about bass and letting go of drums. And I discovered L42 which I suppose was life changing in the sense I obsessed about them for the next 7 years or so. But it wasn't guitar related.

I'm not cool enough to participate in this thread. I was a teenager in the eighties.

I think Nile Rodgers has one, he used it for the Get Lucky video. But his has a clear pick guard.

it really depends on the direction of the connections and how much slack there is in the wiring. There's going to be a lot of twisting.

It's legible but...well, funny you should mention the black ink...I can do any colour your heart desires though. Fuchsia perhaps? I was working on the schematic up until midnight and made some major changes that means (thankfully) I may only need 2 pole not 4 pole and I'm probably going to ditch the reverse phasing for now as it might not be needed. The whole point of doing this was to get my head around the switching arrangement as a form of escapism over CNY to stave off boredom. It worked. I've also been tweaking the body a little more and worked up two alternative designs using a Kahler 4200 X trem bridge, one has a glue in neck and the other is through. However there aren't any CAD blocks out there of the X trem so it seems like I'm going to have to buy one and work it up myself just like I did with the Wilkinson VS100. But Kahler's installation instructions are a whole load more helpful than Wilkinson's and drawn up in CAD.

Last night I decided to tackle the matter of whether phase switching was needed for positions involving two pickups. I did a bit of research on the sound of reverse phased pickups and found one vid where the vlogger had switched the phase of pickups in his telecaster and it sounded damn close to the Aria Esprit. So then the challenge was to adapt the original circuit diagram, but the more I looked into it, the more it seemed like a separate pole was needed to handle the earth/neg side...and I didn't have one spare because of the need to connect the middle pickup to two different poles. By late this morning I'd more or less given up and was in the process of typing an email to someone asking for help when it occured to me that instead of making the middle pickup switch from one side of the preamp to the other, why not make the neck and bridge swap from one side to the other and have the mid stay on the same channel while it's connected. I did a bit of mucking about with connections and found that not only could it work but it actually freed up one pole for use as an earth so it was possible to switch phasing for the bridge pickup in position 4 by swapping neg and positive around. I also had to wire up the neg side for all the other pickups to run through pole 2 as well but the point was it's possible. This also means I can go back to the plan to have a push pull vol pot to switch the preamp in and out. I have also found a supplier on Made-in-China who does 6 position 4 pole pots and they don't cost anywhere near the same as those made by Stewmac. This is subject to further tweaks, for example, I suspect pole 4 won't be needed either if I make better use of the vacant positions on pole 1.

I love Mesa Boogie amps and have searched on YouTube for review clips of the 5:25. It's supposed to be pretty versatile.

It's a way of describing a physical or electronic vibration. The ringing noise. Is it something physically vibrating or is it something feeding back electronically?

Sounds like an earth loop with something else attached to the mains. It could well be the other thing which is faulty. Maybe there's a piece of internet equipment not earthed properly.

is it an electronic or mechanical oscillation?

I think it tightens up the low end and boosts the midst a little.

Damn typo :)

Good luck! If you still can't find the problem then there might be a failed component somewhere but this would be very unusual. Ironic that none of us like in the UK, huh?

Well, I'm in the same boat as you. My nearest luthier is 600km away in Hong Kong and unaccompanied baggage attracts import duty. I've learned through trial and error to be self sufficient.

Is it just me or are you missing a .220k resistor and 680 pf capacitor on the master volume? Your tones seem wired up OK but I can't really tell what you're doing with the humbucker wiring. Given silence rather than hum is the main issue, I would suggest that you may be grounding the audio signal somewhere. Are you sure that the humbucker wiring is OK? Through a process of elimination, you should be able to trace the lack of beeps to a specific connection. Take the multimeter and set it to the connectivity mode (it'll make a noise when the two tips are brought together). First take everything off the pickguard and check if you are getting a signal from all the pickups by tapping the magnets with something metal while the circuit is plugged into an amp at low volume. If you hear a tap on all three after isolation from the pickguard then it means the live signal somewhere in the circuit is being grounded directly by the pickguard shielding rather than an earth wire. Check for potential contact between a pot, a joint or a wire and the pickguard. If you're not hearing a clear and distinctive tap on one of the selection settings then you know that the silent pickup is either broken or is wired incorrectly - probably with the live tag touching an earth connection somewhere. To test the pickup, put each tip of the multimeter on one of the leads with the pickup NOT selected and see if you get a beep. If you get a beep, the pickup is OK. To test the pickup selector, you'll need to place the black tip on the earth connection and test each pick up connection on every position of the selector switch, listening for any unexpected beeps. You'll need to pay attention to how the selector is wired, take your time and be ruthlessly methodical. If you're not hearing any taps from the pickups regardless of selection, it could mean the grounding is happening further down the line - either the tone or volume. Put the black tip against any part of the earth on a pot, turn all the pots up full and check for leakage by putting the red tip on each of the live out (middle) tags. Then check the in tags (right hand side when tags are at 12 o'clock) tags on the pot. When the pots are on full you should get beeps. If you don't then that means the earth is connected to the live signal somewhere between the locations you've put the multimeter tips. If still no joy then test the connections between live tags on different pots (turned on full) and see if you get beeps.

It's one of three builds that are planned. The second one is a "Sustain Machine" which is going to include using a Fernandes Sustainer from my Kleinberger copy, a laminated through body mahogany and maple neck and probably a Kahler 2300 series bridge for effortless divebombing harmonics. The third one is more along the lines of an MSG V2.0 with laminated mahogany/maple neck, another Wilkinson VS100C bridge and PRS Mira pickups (medium gain, much like Pearly Gates) maybe with a single coil if I can find one that matches. I know Martin Booth still makes the MSG for discerning clients. But his skills are in a different league to mine and he's resistant to the idea of three pickup guitars so I'd like to think I'm not treading on his toes here. Now I've put together a drawing specifically for the body fabricators and, in doing so, have been double checking and measuring (where possible) all the critical dimensions. It turns out that the Wilkinson bridge DXF block that I was using is out by a few millimetres in critical places, so I really need to nail the distance between the posts and the edge of the bridge rout. The pickup blocks I'd been using were fractions of a mm out as well which impacts on tolerances. It kind of goes to show that third party CAD blocks can't be trusted in most shapes and forms. It also means I'm going to have to partly disassemble my strat, which has a VS100C already installed, in order to measure the clearances. I also borrowed body dimensions from a Les Paul drawing to begin with but the body depth was too thick (56mm vs 44mm for MSG/43mm for strat) and the neck angle was wrong. Putting it right has taken more work than if I'd taken measurements off the MSG. Serves me right for taking short cuts, I guess.

With the rotary pickup selector, I needed to check what the specification needed to be. At the least, the following settings were going to be needed: Bridge only Bridge + middle (maybe out of phase) Bridge + neck Neck + middle (maybe out of phase) Neck only Normally for a three pickup strat style layout, a 2 pole rotary switch is enough. The neck and bridge pickups can share a pole because they aren't in use at the same time. But in my set up above, I would need at least a 3 pole switch, one for each pickup because I was combining bridge and neck. However, when the low pass filters were taken into consideration, there was also the challenge of how to sum three pickups into two channel eq. Luckily, a four pole rotary switch would probably work, if I summed the four poles into two sides. Each pair of poles into one of the two filters. But there was still the challenge of how to manage the middle pickup in the settings. Again that would be possible if I assigned two of the four poles to it and had the middle pickup switch from one channel to the other, depending on whether it was summed with the neck or bridge pickup. This arrangement does have the disadvantage of upsetting the filter settings with a pickup shift from position 2 to 4 but that would only really be felt if I was playing it live and I have no plans to do that. This is a proof of concept, a prototype which I'll use almost exclusively at home and it's main trick is going to be position 3 anyway so I put together a circuit diagram (without phase switching for positions 2 and 4) as proof of concept where position 1 was now just the piezo and all the others were moved forward by one. Lustihand also advised that in their latest edition circuits, separate boost switches were no longer needed, the boost was activated by push pull pots so there was a welcome visual simplicity and logic to the layout despite despite it being pretty versatile. But while I was browsing on the Stewmac website, I noted they offered 6 position rotary switches with four poles and I started to wonder whether that might be useful. Then I remembered I had a spare Graphtec acoustiphonic preamp left over from my Shuker Headless bass and a quick search of the Graphtec website revealed they offered piezo saddles for the Wilkinson VS100 series bridges. That got me thinking about a clean piezo/acoustic type sound for one of the six positions so I threw it into the diagram and it seemed to work. It would sit with the overall mission of the guitar for cleans. And I also had a spare hexaphonic PCB which opened up the possibilities of pitch-to-MIDI. Hmmm.

For the body I kept changing my mind for things beyond selecting alder for the wood. I started off wanting to do a body shape inspired by my Yamaha MSG deluxes (which Alan Murphy also played while with Level 42). Then reason grabbed hold and I started to ask myself what was wrong with just going with a stratocaster body. But I figured I might as well CAD the MSG body shape up and see what it looked like with the RS Esprit pickup layout. I was quite pleased with how it looked. OK so the dimensions here are all over the place, the scale is wrong and the spacing and size of the pickups is wrong, the bridge is slightly out and the Gibson ES346 inspired headstock is going to be at a 13 degree angle in this view. But it reminded me a bit of the PRS 305. While I was drawing the control layout, I started to think about the pickup selection and realised that a toggle switch wasn't going to be up to the job if phase switching in addition to neck+bridge was necessary. Another option was to use a rotary pickup selector like PRS. Exploring that that bought me onto reviewing the electronics package in more detail.