Wear your ply with pride pt. 14

I have made a very wrong assumption.

If you were Washburn in the 80s and you were going to go for a minor redesign of the Floyd Rose licensed tremolo, I kind of assumed that despite changing the stud spacing for it you'd leave the other measurements pretty much intact.

I was wrong.

The RR2V is impossible to intonate correctly, the tremolo is simply too far from the nut. I thought it sounded dead off and the string tension felt weird when I strung it last night.

A very quick wave of a yardstick at the guitar shows the studs to be pretty much dead on the 25.5" scale length from the nut. Conventional Floyd Rose studs would be about 25.1" away. You can probably see from the photo of the two tremolo base plates side by side that the knife edges on the 600-T are much further back. Or alternatively, the saddles much further forward.

I can sort of imagine a reason for this. If I've got my mental picture of the tremolo action right this would mean the intonation point moves closer to the pivot point. Which feels like it should make things more stable/subtle but offer less range.

So I've got to undo a load of the work I've done, plug the holes, redrill them closer to the nut and take a router to the top again. I may even need to take a router to the spring cavity underneath.

It could have been worse, the studs could have been too close. Which would have been hard to rectify. Although I'm yet to actually work out whether bringing the studs forward will make them too close to the bridge pickup cavity.

As I've routed an inset in the top this will now be in the wrong place. The only remedy I can think of for this would be to route it deeply with a profile bit to make a 'feature' of it.

Or maybe my vague notion to make a new body using the original as a template just got a step closer. No matter, the whole point of this turd polishing exercise was to get better at shining those turds as preparation for actually laying one of my own.

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