Just a swift tap

So, I've ordered a new nut for the Columbus, but in the meantime while I'm waiting for it to come I've removed the old one.

Standard wisdom is to score the finish round the old nut so it doesn't take it off then give the nut a quick tap with a wooden block. This worked just fine.

There was quite a nasty build up of finish in front of the nut and the new nut is going to be slightly thicker than the old so this needs to be flattened down. It was also generally a bit crusty around the nut.

Sadly, with the very first stroke of a needle file a flake of finish flew off. I managed to find it and stick it back in place with a drop of superglue. If it were a valuable vintage guitar obviously this would be a disaster, but as this is a cheap shitter it really doesn't matter.

I then worked at it with some sandpaper, a needle file and Stanley knife blade to clean it up and it seems to have gone OK. There is a little spot where the finish has gone through but it shouldn't show once the nut and truss rod cover are back on.

So, just need the nut to come now.

Nostalgia is just what it used to be

So a while back I was thinking about picking up a 70s Columbus Les Paul copy like my first guitar and it was only a matter of time before I did.

This one was more in the price range I expected for such a piece of old tat than what they normally seemed to go for, thanks to a slightly rubbish eBay listing and a neck pocket crack.

Having arrived I've given it my usual clean and check over. It was absolutely minging with the sort of pitch black corroded strings I associate with teenage ownership. I did play it briefly and it seemed to all be working apart from crackly pots and a loose jack but frankly it was too vile to handle for very long.

Looking it over carefully, taking a pickup out and having the covers off I've discovered it appears to be 100% original right down to all the electrics with solder unbroken.

At some point the neck volume pot has come loose and spun, yanking the wire off the tone pot. So I quickly resoldered that. I removed all the pots (which had all spun round and been retightened), unwound the cabling so it wasn't taut then put it back as it should be.

The pickups are odd. I'd seen comment online that they were actually single coils under a humbucker cover and that would seem to be correct. It's not clear from the photo but where the 'slug' bobbin should be there's just a space. What I don't quite get is that when I played it with the gain right up on my HT-1R there really wasn't very much unwanted electrical noise.

The body is ply of some kind but it looks like instead of taking a big lump then drilling/routing cavities they actually made a sandwich of three bits of ply with bits already routed out. So the channel from the toggle switch back to the main control cavity is a big square one, not a drilled hole. Very odd.

It's obviously had 'one careful owner, ten not so careful' and is covered in small scratches/dings but none of these are terrible, the neck is seemingly straight-ish and none of the hardware is butchered. Which is good going for a 30+ year old cheap guitar.

The only obvious bad thing so far is the nut. Somebody has cut this, probably using the same not so small needle file for all the strings. So apart from bottom E they lurk in huge ugly slots. It played OK but I can't leave it like this.

So I'm going to fit and slot a new nut. Once this is done I'll post my usual five pictures of the guitar in ready to play state.

Slow progress on the RS10V

So I've had a busy weekend but decided to have a little go at the RS10V this evening.

I carefully drilled the pilot holes for the tremolo studs then waved the tremolo and routing templates at the body. I'm going to have to route the body a fair bit deeper for the tremolo to be any use as the Speedloader has quite a lot of gubbins at the back.

Despite this the guided router bit I have is quite deep so I'll probably still have to raise the router template up on blocks. I think I need to get another shorter bit. I also need some more varied drill bits as the tremolo studs look to fit an approximately 9.8mm hole rather than a 10mm one.

This conspired to make me give up on this for tonight, but I may have another look next weekend.

Marking up the RS10V

I spent a bit of time marking up the RS10V this evening.

I don't have a particularly good way to do this on a made up guitar, especially one with a carved top, most instructions seem to revolve around building a guitar from scratch and working from a centre line.

The way I've done this so far is to take a long straight edge and extend lines out from the edge of the neck across the body then measure an equal distance from the nut on both sides.

I did this on the RS10V and carefully checked it twice. It looks right by eye but then that doesn't mean much.

Next thing is to drill some small pilot holes and check it all again before drilling the holes out to their final size.

Sacrifice the Virgin

I just couldn't resist that post title.

Last month I bought this BC Rich Virgin to remove the Speedloader bridge from and today I finally got round to it.

The Speedloader uses really nice fine pitch thread tremolo studs, much better than the usual sloppy ones on cheap tremolos. So I wanted to remove these too. However my usual method of screwing a long bolt into them and using a block/nut to draw them out wasn't going to work as I simply don't have anything with the same thread.

This means I had to make another puller which can use the actual studs themselves to pull the bushes out. It'll come in useful occasionally when I find something with an odd thread.

Before I pulled the studs, I carefully measured the distance from the nut to the stud centres. This is so I can redrill the studs on the RS10V.

This turned out to be 25-3/16" or 640mm, which seem to be one of those rare measurements where sane imperial and metric measurements are so close as to be equivalent. The distance between the studs is the usual 74mm.

So I've now got an entire Floyd Rose Speedloader, along with the tremolo stop they seem to fit as part of the kit ready to go.

When I'll find time to start work on the RS10V I'm not sure. I do need to decide if I'm going to fit a normal tremolo to the Virgin or if I'm just going to get rid of it as it stands.

Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?

There's something very very serious about aluminium flightcases.

I feel like I should be using it to house a nuclear bomb, complete with flashing lights and a button that should never ever be pushed, not my old EC29.

Still carrying it around makes me feel like John Travolta in Broken Arrow, off to sell a nuke to the bad guys while delivering the best lines in the film.

As opposed to the man who made Battlefield Earth.

BC Rich #4 - 'NJ Speedloader Virgin'

This is the guitar with about the naffest 'stop sniggering at the back' name you could imagine. It even came with a terrible tacky 'have you plucked a Virgin?' ad campaign when launched.

Oh well this one was pretty cheap.

This is very very similar to my Warlock, the upper bout is similarly shaped and the neck is probably identical apart from the truss rod cover.

I have no intention of keeping this. It has been bought to steal the Speedloader tremolo from so I can fit it to my RS10V project.

The seller shipped it with the neck unbolted and when I put it back together it was pretty clear they didn't know how to set the Speedloader up as it was all over the place with some of the fine tuners wound right down. Now set up, I've played it for about half an hour and it's nice enough. These Korean NJs weren't cheap originally despite being bolt-on models and they're much nicer than the modern cheapo models. The body shape actually works well, it's light and pretty compact. Still a stupid name though.

The main feature is the Speedloader which is a piece of nicely finished US engineering. It's the sort of quality that you'd expect from Schaller or Gotoh and a massive step up in sophistication and precision from an original Floyd Rose.

Whether or not it's actually a good idea is debatable though.

Setting them up is super fiddly. Alternative tunings are nigh impossible (you might manage half a step either way, but I'm not going to try) unless somebody makes special string sets. Which they won't. Standard tuning strings are uncommon enough.

Once set up though, string changes are amazingly simple and can be done in seconds. The string starts at tension and you just need to fine tune it.

Tuning stability is great, but you'd kind of expect that.

If I manage to swap the Speedloader onto the RS10V, I think I'll just sell the carcass on. It'd make an ideal project for somebody to drill the headstock for machine heads and fit a standard tremolo.