BUILD IT! PLAY IT! LOVE IT!
Building a Hot Mod Guitar – pt 5 At last! After months of slavish labour in his Guitar Research Laboratory Simon Croft wires up his project guitar build, gets those strings on and plugs it in for the first time…
You may have been wondering as you follow this project: when does he get a guitar that he can actually play? I know I’ve been keen to get to that stage, too! It’s been months since I started putting this guitar together but now the guitar is playable and I’ll be posting a video to prove it! That doesn’t mean the guitar is finished, though. This is just the ‘dry build’ to make sure that
everything is in the right place before I put the finish on the body. As it happens, I’m really glad I went through this stage because I’ve already decided I want to move the jack input to the side of the guitar: mainly because the plug is a little bit in the way, unless you use a guitar cable with a right angle jack.
want three controls, even though this is a two-pickup guitar. These Wilkinson pickups are more versatile than I realised at first, so I’ll be showing you my ‘super-Tele’ wiring next issue. Meanwhile, I’ll take you though the steps that got me to a playable instrument. The first thing I did this month was drill the holes in the body for the scratch-plate screws. This isn’t a very difficult task but it’s worth making sure that the plate isn’t going to move, otherwise your holes won’t line up! In the case of my project guitar, the bridge
plate holds the scratch-plate fairly firmly in place and all I had to do to really lock it down was push the neck into the socket. On some guitars, like most Strats, the plate has quite a bit of movement in it with no screws, so it’s important to get the plate into the position where all the pickups line up correctly and the cut-out around the vibrato doesn’t catch the edge of its metal bridge plate. When you’re drilling holes through a plate that
might move, the best thing to do is clamp or tape the plate down while you make the first couple of holes, then put those screws in. That way, you’ll be certain that all the other holes will be drilled in the right place.
Fig. 1 - Having to feed the wire for the bass pickup through the body before connecting both pickups to the switch made things quite tricky.
Now we’re getting closer to deciding what the final electrics are going to be like and I definitely
Next step was to put in the electrics. This turned out to be slightly more complicated than it would be many production guitars because the treble pickup has to be in the bridge plate before you screw it down. Meanwhile, the neck position pickup is mounted onto the scratch-plate – but also, the neck pickup wiring feeds down a neat hole into the treble pickup cavity under the bridge (Figure1). I made sure that I left plenty of extra cable on both pickups and fortunately, the control cavity is roomy enough to stash the wiring neatly inside. Initially I had a volume-plus-tone wiring
Fig. 2 - Even though this was the simplest of wiring schemes, I tried to keep everything as tidy as possible.
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scheme in mind, plus a typical Telecaster-style selector scheme. Then I remembered how much a tone control can change the sound of a Tele, even when it’s flat out, so I binned the tone knob in favour of a simple yet effective volume and pickup selector – very stripped down! (Figure 2) Although I’ll be shielding the control cavities and scratch-plate when I come to my final build, I
was more interested in getting the loaded scratch-plate soldered (figure 3) and screwed down. There was one thing I did to limit unwanted noise though. I soldered an earth wire to the casing of one of the pots. At the other end of the wire, I stripped off about 20mm from the insulation.
Then I slacked off the bridge plate, so that I
could put that last 20mm of wire under it, and screwed it back down. (For now, that will limit unwanted buzzing noises, but I’ll be looking at more advanced noise reducing schemes when we get to the final wiring.) The next step was to screw the wired scratch-plate down, followed by bolting the neck back on. (Figure 4)
Fig. 3 -Soldering is a skill worth practicing because dry joints or burnt out components won’t do your custom build any favours.
If you’ve followed my earlier articles and videos, you’ll know I have this trick of keeping the slack strings in place with masking tape (figure 5), so as soon as I bolted the neck on, the strings were there. (OK, the high E broke – damn! – but it still saved me from buying another set of strings.) Once I’d bolted the neck back on, got the strings up to pitch and made a few action adjustments, it was time to play. So what do I think? I think I’ve got a really brilliant guitar! The combination of body woods and the Wilkinson pickups already sounds great. Yes, I’ll change the wiring scheme for the final build, put the jack socket at the side – and I’ll dress the frets. But – own up – once I’ve got this guitar body finished, I’ll have a very luxurious instrument. (Figure 6) PM
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