Still avoiding sanding

I've been tackling the RS10V today instead of the sanding.

First up I had to see what size hole I needed to drill for the bushes, they seemed a bit big for a 9.5mm but might be loose in a 10mm one. So I did a couple of test holes in a piece of scrap wood.

It turned out the 10mm hole was a fairly snug fit, so I drilled out the holes I'd marked previously.

With this done I loosely assembled it, using a clamp to hold the nut on so I could check that the studs were in the right place and the strings looked right. They're both rather close to the edge of the fretboard as the RS10V probably has a narrower neck than the donor BC Rich, but it looks OK to me.

So I went ahead and screwed the nut to the neck, roughly fitted a pickup so I could test the guitar and stuck the strings on.

Starting from an unknown position the Speedloader is a bit of a pain to set up. Mostly because the little grub hex screws in the saddles that are used for gross tuning are really fiddly to use.

Balancing these, the spring tension and the tremolo rest position took a fair old while, but in the end it's nicely sorted and close to intonated without having to move the saddles. Which shows I must have got the bridge in the right position.

I had to adjust the truss rod a couple of times as it had zero relief and buzzed badly at the lower frets, which is part of the reason this took so long.

Now I've done this I'm going to have to strip it down again to deepen and shift back the tremolo route. There's almost no upward movement on the tremolo as it hits the body. I'll leave this until another day as I'll give the neck a few days to 'settle'.

I also want to route a little off the nut shelf, the nut is currently excessively high. Thankfully I've already made myself a jig for this.

Snake oil or not?

When I modified the mahogany strat I definitely was aiming for a 'hot rodded' one.

One of the things I dislike about strats is when the tremolo isn't very stable in use. I get you can't hang off it like a locking one, but I want to be able to use it a little. However tuning wasn't that stable, despite the quite decent 'modern' Wilkinson tremolo I fitted.

It already had decent locking machine heads but with the string trees currently fitted the strings were going through quite a steep angle from the nut. I sort of figured this is half the problem. I was considering spacing them out from the face of the headstock with some washers but managed to pick up some GraphTech Tusq string trees cheaply that are not only slightly taller but supposedly made of magic lubricating stuff.

Having fitted these it certainly keeps tune better when you use the tremolo, is that because of the gentler angle, the smooth contoured slots in the trees or the magic lubricating stuff they're made of?

I may tread this very well worn road some more and fit a GraphTech nut as well. The current nut is dirty and chipped anyway, even though it's 100% usable.

Ideally I'd also like to fit the 2-point tremolo I bought, which I'll revisit at some point.

Can you tell I'm putting off sanding.

Buy in haste, repent at leisure

So, I saw an Indie Extreme Plus for sale that somebody had refinished. I figured it couldn't be that bad.

I was wrong.

Given the refinish is godawful and it was put back together with about the cheapiest nastiest Chinese components you can buy, some of which don't fit properly and zero attention to detail I've massively overpaid.

The seller did say it had a few rough edges but wrote "I reckon I have made a good fist of the painting" and no they haven't.

They have destroyed the delicate carving in the top, I was half expecting this though. Some sections haven't had all the finish removed and others are oversanded so that there are small dips in it. They've barely bothered removing finish from the sides and back, just enough to mess it up and mean it all needs sanding off now.

Then they've got the paint all over the place including the neck.

I could see the sides would need redoing from their photos but the mess they've made of the top and the overspray on the neck really wasn't clear.

It looks like some half-arsed teenager's project that they got bored of. I should have negged them but couldn't face the recriminations and neg back.

Worst of all I have lined myself up for a load more sanding, voluntarily. What was I thinking?

I suspect this will languish a long time untouched.

Project pile

We're almost into August and the project pile never seems to get much smaller as things keep leapfrogging stuff I've had in bits for ages.

Right now, on the kitchen table I have the Goth Explorer, 'Dave Murray tribute' strat and RS10V headless conversion.

My other hobby of tabletop gaming is going on hold for a couple of months so I'm going to knuckle down and try to finish these off. Both the Explorer and strat are refinishing jobs that have stalled at the interminably dull sanding (or resanding) stage.

The RS10V is going to need routing, drilling and some reshaping of the neck where the headstock used to be before turning into a refinishing project and complete rewire.

So I really ought to get the other refinishes at least resumed before fiddling with the RS10V. It's just that I so hate sanding.

Columbus #2 - 'Les Paul Custom' black

A while back I expressed a nostalgic urge to own a 70s Columbus Les Paul Custom like my first guitar. They're not hard to come by so here I am with one. It's spent a while being fettled into a state where it's nice to play as opposed to the filthy mess it was in when I got it.

With the nut replaced so it's closer to how it would have originally been, it's surprisingly playable. I don't really like the small 70s frets, I'm definitely a fan of modern jumbo ones but still if I were a skint teenager there's essentially nothing wrong with this. Its modern Korean equivalent (you could get a Washburn WI64 Idol secondhand for £100 if you're lucky) would be much better, but this is hardly unplayable junk.

I remembered the plastic parts on mine seeming nasty but actually this is pretty solid, although the scratchplate is somewhat brittle. The switch toggle for example is really quite nice and the witch hat knobs are better than the ones I bought to stuff on the BFG.

It's very obviously a cheap plywood bodied guitar, the binding is uneven and finish is bad with numerous little crusty bits and imperfections that look like they've always been there rather than it having gained them over its 30+ year life.

The ABR-1 style bridge and tailpiece however are nicely made and have survived very well, with little in the way of corrosion. The diamond back machine heads are perhaps a weak point, while they're intact and work OK they're really kind of wobbly/loose. They don't seem to hold tune that well, they're not terrible but even cheap modern guitars seem to come with very decent Schaller style sealed tuners that are rock solid.

All the controls still work with a crackle at the bottom end of the neck volume, but that's it. Pretty good for 30+ years, I imagine I won't be able to say that about many of my other guitars if they ever reach that age.

The pickups are weird things, being like one coil of a humbucker under a full humbucker cover. They were terribly microphonic when I got it but I've wax potted them and they're much much better now. Oddly they don't really sound like single coils. They sound like somewhat bright Alnico magnet humbuckers with a side order of electrical noise. You'd kind of expect them to be like P90s but they're not. They seem to have more in common with the EMG Selects in my RS8V. The output doesn't really suffer, I could manage my usual assortment of 80s/90s thrash on it without resorting to extra gain.

The only real damage to this are cracks in the neck pocket that almost look like the ply has separated after an impact as they run along one of the layers, which you can see in the finish. Having said that the neck is stable and the guitar plays fine so I'm not worried about it. If you heave on the neck when playing it does move more than most other things I've got but it's a fairly lightly constructed guitar so that's not unreasonable.

There's some wear to the skinny 70s frets but it's not terrible and the neck is straight enough. There was a tiny bit more relief than I like which I tried to take out with the truss rod but it got very tight very soon so I stopped fiddling with it.

This is obviously not quite the sublime toy that things like my EC29s are but it really does play perfectly well, I could hammer out all the same old stuff easily even if I did find the small frets vaguely irritating. The combination of pickups, bolt-on construction, thinner neck, light weight and so on contribute to it really 'ringing' in the way a more accurate Les Paul copy doesn't, at the cost of some sustain. It has a character of its own that doesn't disappoint, despite it being in the end just a piece of nasty 70s tat.

However if I were to ever utter the phrase 'vintage mojo' about one of these feel free to slap me.

Well that was a lot easier and quicker than expected

I had expected slotting the nut to be harder and more time consuming than it was. This is one of those jobs that people recommend trying on a worthless guitar and while there certainly is scope to mess it up I don't think it's anywhere as dangerous as you'd expect.

Anyway the Columbus fit the bill and the new nut was grossly high so it had to be done.

The recommended method seems to be to stick something to the fretboard to protect it and guide the height you file to. I used a bit of old motorcycle inner tube.

Getting down to a suitable height proved pretty straightforward and the files cut cleanly down without wandering. Once I'd got down to the chosen level I played the guitar a little and decided it needed lowering further still. For the second cut I used a cable tie taped to the fretboard.

The guitar has very small frets which feel like those on a 70s Gibson 'fretless wonder' I once played and I've taken the nut down really low to match this. Maybe a bit too far although it doesn't actually buzz on the open strings. Still I like guitars where the nut height has been lowered beyond than the usual conservatively high default.

With the slots cut I took a palm sander carefully to the top of the nut and shaped it into something that doesn't look ridiculous. Which was also fairly easy and I'm pleased with the results. It doesn't really look any less tidy than the nut I paid a professional to fit.

With this done I gave the frets a quick polish using wire wool too, gotta polish that turd.

Finally getting to play it properly for a bit I wound the volume up on my HT1-R and found it suffered badly from microphonic pickups. Which was hardly a surprise. So I whipped my pot of wax out, melted it and potted the pickups.

I wanted to avoid taking the guitar completely to bits and disturbing the electrics so I dangled the whole guitar over a shallow container full of wax to pot them. Once cooled and with the guitar back together it's really helped, they're not 100% immune but they are now much much better.

If it looks right it probably is

Having received the nuts I ordered I was worried it would be necessary to mess about recutting the slots as on paper the nut was wider than the existing one. In practice it's pretty much a perfect fit even if it is way too tall.

I could in principle have messed about measuring the string to string spacing and distance from the edge of the fretboard but when it comes down to it, the human brain is quite good at spotting when things are evenly spaced and/or parallel. It's close enough for me.

Playing the guitar a little with it like this the nut is so high it's noticeably out of tune at the first few frets. As you fret the note you're moving the string so far it's like a small string bend. It'd probably be good for playing slide though.

So I've glued the nut and left the strings at tension while it dries to keep it in place.

Cutting the nut slots deep enough then finishing it off is going to be a bit of a chore. I've got some nut files but I'll probably have to start with a fine saw.

I did start off sanding some material from the bottom of the nut but bottled it after a while as I got worried I'd end up with the bottom being no longer flat and square. Taking material off the top of the nut afterwards means I won't need to worry about that.