Easy win #3

My old RS530 was never going to get played with a crappy jack socket, so it's been replaced with a decent Switchcraft one I had knocking about.

There should now be no excuse for me not to play this more often.

Easy win #1 & #2

So if I'm going to polish off any of my massive project list I need some 'easy wins'. First up was the RS8V.

Today I swapped out the tremolo studs for a pair taken from one of the MG440s. Which I really should have done the other day when I had the tremolo off. Putting them in with a tiny amount of grease on the threads made adjusting the height a breeze and the unchewed posts have made the tremolo more stable.

Also, somebody had at some point removed a tool holder from the back of the headstock leaving nasty holes. I happened to have one that fitted right kicking around so I popped that on.

While I was there I gave the truss rod another quick tweak, the relief is slowly getting towards what I think it should be. However I can already tell I am going to end up lowering the action at the nut slightly. As I get the action otherwise sorted the high nut is really starting to stand out. I don't fancy attacking the nut shelf with sandpaper. This is doubly so as the nut rests on the neck rather than a shelf on the fretboard. So I can see me having to hunt about for a lower nut.

I reckon this is going to be a fantastic fast playing rock guitar if I ever get it set up right.

Project review

Looking at the Mockingbird again has made me think I need to review my various projects.

• Mockinbird - plays like shite and that's not in a good way
• Goth Explorer - plays OK, looks like shite, not fully wired up, kind of redundant now I got my DT350X back
• RR2V - plays nicely, tremolo fucked, no locking clamps for nut, looks like shite
• MG440TPL - essentially done, but has crackly pots and an uncertain destiny
• MG440PWS - need to lower tremolo by taking a router to it
• Black RS530 - dodgy jack socket
• Marine Burst RS530 - frets badly worn, but plays OK. Just.
• Rhoads Ex Pro - plays fantastically, looks like shite. May stay like this as it's genuinely 'reliced'
• RS8V - needs more setup
• Red EC29 - need to redo the scratchplate
• Trans gold KC90 - dodgy jack socket
• Headless thing - plays like shite
• Shape custom semi-hollow - plan to fit a bridge humbucker but otherwise perfect

I really mustn't acquire any more 'project' guitars. There are undoubtedly a few more gratuitous pickup swaps on the cards too beyond the semi-hollow. I fancy a neck P90 in the IJ1 for a start and I've a Seymour Duncan Jazz/JB combo sitting in a box aching to go into something. That's it I'm not allowed to speculatively buy any 'cheap' pickups either. Unless I really need them for something specific of course. :-)

Most of these are something I can see me making progress on. However the MG440s are in limbo as once fixed they've got bugger all resale value and my only interest in them is the messing around with them. I really should just break them down and 'part them out' to use an Americanism but I can't bring myself to do it.

The neck from the MG440TPL would look nice on a more standard strat body but I reckon the combination of wide heel and 24 frets would make it a serious hack and slash job to fit. You'd probably need to start with a hardtail body too as the bridge is going to move a tad unless you move the neck pickup back a bit to cater for the 24 frets. All in all a lot quicker to just buy a matching neck and body if I wanted a trad-ish looking strat with a maple board and locking trem.

Whatever happens I've got something to do on the coming winter evenings.

Your mission, should you accept it...

...is to try and make this Mockingbird play nicely.

One of my first noughties acquisitions, this has never played well. I got it in a scruffy state, changed the hardware, messed around with several flavours of pickups and so on but it has never been nice to play. In fact it's always been a bit nasty.

So today I ripped out the pickups that were in there. The bridge pot I used last time I swapped things around was iffy so I simply wired up the original BC Rich bridge pickup straight to the jack socket. This way I will not be at all distracted by dicking around with the electrics and can just concentrate on working out what it is that makes it nasty.

A very quick look shows the following.

• Almost no (if any) relief in the neck
• A quite high action at the nut

These could easily be conspiring to result in the current state of it. The cheap-ass tremolo (literally the cheapest I could buy so I could see what a gold one looked like on the guitar) is something to think about swapping but to be honest it works OK.

RS8V setup

When I got my RS8V recently I tried to set it up and found that I couldn't get the action low enough for my tastes.

This was simply because the heads on the tremolo studs were quite chewed up and I couldn't shift them very much with the tremolo under tension. As I wasn't sure if this was because they were stiff or had reached the end of their travel, today I slackened the strings, removed the tremolo and wound the studs down.

It was pretty obvious with the tension off that they're simply a little stiff so I've now got it closer to what I want. There's still a little more bow in the neck than I'd like so I adjusted the truss rod again while the strings were slack.

This still leaves a fair bit of relief, so I may have to revisit this and make a jig to take the tension off the rod while I tighten it. It was getting pretty tight and I don't want to mess it up.

There is a possibility I'll mess the neck up if I go OTT with this, but then again it wasn't the most expensive guitar and I like the process of learning how to make things play better.

EC29 rewire - again

Today I finished up another rewire of my teal EC29. The active Reflex pickups that were in it when I bought it failed a while ago and about a year back I put in a Kent Armstrong Motherbucker and cool rail to get it playable.

I've now swapped to active Seymour Duncans, a 'Blackouts Metal AHB-2' in the bridge position and a 'Blackouts Single AS-1' in the neck (well middle really) position.

As they're both switchable output pickups I made up my own quick connect leads so instead of just placing a jumper on the pickup I could switch the output from normal to hot easily. The multicore shielded cable I used was quite thick so I had to route out a little channel in the back of the battery compartment for it to have any chance of fitting. It was always stupidly tight anyway so this was kind of necessary before I started.

This, combined with a couple of busy weekends and general laziness meant it's taken me a couple of weeks to finish the job.

I used a Dimarzio double wafer switch and wired it up so I got the following options in order.

Bridge hot
Bridge
Bridge & Middle hot
Middle hot
Middle

I did think about just using a 3-way switch and push-pull pots to do the hot/not switching but fancied trying this.

Wired up like this means there's a clear progression in output as you use the switch from 'moderate single coil' to 'stupid high gain death'.

So far I'm quite happy with this and think it complements my other EC29 with the passive SSL-2/TB-4 Seymour Duncan setup well. It's all a bit metal but then so is this guitar.

Mirage #1 - crapola Steinberger clone

In the mid 90s I had a Hohner G3T, which was a very acceptable clone of the classic Steinberger L-series, only made in traditional materials. I ostensibly had this, along with a Zoom 9000 to practice at work in my lunch hour.

In reality I spent lunchtime in the pub and never liked the sounds I got from the Zoom. So both got sold on, the Zoom at quite scary a loss but there you go.

With an eye to resurrecting this idea I've been keeping a look out for a travel guitar. However the Hohners go for very good money, as do pretty much any decent travel guitars. You get the odd no-name one come up but they're always far too pricey to take a risk on.

Somebody put this up on eBay with a £75 'buy it now' and it hit my threshold for taking a risk on an unknown quantity. How bad could it be I thought.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. This is by far the nastiest guitar I have ever touched. It looks OK at first glance but it's nasty.

The actual neck is OK. It came with quite a bow in it and having adjusted the truss rod it's now much better. The frets were grotty, like they're corroded and I've cleaned it off but I bet it comes back. The rosewood is obviously the nastiest driest stuff they could find and not very well finished.

It has a zero fret, like the original Steinbergers but the locking nut isn't fitted very well and doesn't hold the strings down against it hard enough. So the top E/B strings don't really sound properly.

The bridge is made by the improbable sounding 'Overlord of Music' out of mystery monkey metal. This includes the saddles, so I can see them wearing pretty quickly. The whole thing is shonky in the extreme. Locked in place it's not very stable, I dread to think what it would be like if I found a tremolo arm that fitted and tried to use that.

Even with the worst of the bow taken out of the neck, the action is excessively high and there's simply no adjustment available to lower it. Each saddle can be adjusted but they all came at the lowest position without any effort to match the fretboard radius. I may do this but it's only going to raise the action. I think I'd need to route out the body a bit and lower the whole bridge assembly a little to fix it. The neck is set so there's no real opportunity to change the angle.

Amazingly it sounds kind of OK once stuck through my JamVox, the pickups are sort of acceptable and all the controls work. Setting the stupid action aside it actually plays OK, but feels nasty while doing so.

I could spend lots of time sorting this out but you know I'm not sure I can be arsed. I may fix the worst bits (the nut really) and punt it back to eBay. If I do I'm tempted to steal the leg rest for my Jackson Rhoads so I can play it sitting down.

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