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.

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.

Making a scratchplate for the EC29 - part 3

I was off work today so fiddled with this some more.

After marking out the pickup cutouts more accurately with some pickup surrounds I cut them out. I've get much better at cutting things with the Dremel, as per usual you work out the best way of doing something just as you come to the end of the job.

I used a sander mandrel to shape the lower edge of the scratchplate quite a bit and made the point at the lower horn much more aggressive.

Drilling the holes was a bit hit and miss, I clamped the plate to the guitar then poked a pen through the holes from the back but it seemed to still move about so this took a few goes. I used a Stanley knife to scrape a bevel along the edge of the plate as the last step.

The second photo is it all back together with the plate stuck to the guitar body with double sided tape. In the end I had drilled the bridge pickup mounting holes too far back and had to make them oval for it to work.

More of an issue is that the neck pickup is slightly too far toward the bass strings, it'll work but realistically I'm going to have to make a second scratchplate to correct this. You can't really see this in the photo because of parallax but it's obvious when you look at the guitar.

Anyway, I'm happy with this as a proof of concept. It does the faux strat thing well and may make people do a double-take. Which was the whole idea.

Tomorrow I'll wire this back up and use it for a bit before tackling the next iteration of my project.

Making a scratchplate for the EC29 - part 2

Well tonight I did a little playing with a Dremel in a router table and cut down the scratchplate based on my paper template.

It's not quite there yet and I've yet to start on the pickup cutouts but it's looking believable rather than a ridiculous wobbly mess.

I've cut the neck pocket too large and it still needs a fair bit trimmed from the lower edge but I'll work on that carefully. I've got a few days off over Easter so I'll have time to tackle this.

If I mess it up I'll just buy another piece of scratchplate material, it's not massively expensive for simple 3-ply. I was thinking of starting with a piece of clear perspex to make a template but abandoned the idea as I'd just end up doing the same work twice.

Making a scratchplate for the EC29 - part 1

As I've mentioned before, my red EC29 was butchered when I bought it and I made a half finished attempt to clean it up and sort it out. I'd been discussing the damage with JayGee and we'd thought it might be amusing to fit a very trad strat style scratchplate on such a ridiculous guitar, especially as it's essentially in Candy Apple red anyway.

I also suspected this would manage to hide the damage without me needing to get the guitar refinished too. So far this is looking promising although I may need to polish out some of the oversanding I did.

Today I chopped up an old strat scratchplate I had lying around and offered it up to the guitar to see how it would sit. It's very obvious from the first couple of photos that there's no way one is anywhere near the right shape. The whole thing needs to be shortened massively in the lower half to work.

The top half kind of looks right in the first photo but you have to subsume the route for the Floyd Rose and the bottom half is never going to be 100% right because of the control layout.

Anyway, after taping the guitar up to avoid yet more scratches and a bit of messing around with some stiff paper, scissors and a Stanley knife the third picture shows where I've got to.

I've transferred an outline of this template to a sheet of 3-ply scratchplate material I've bought for the job and in the next few days I'll try to cut it. I've got a Dremel and a cutter bit that seems to work OK on the material, but it's not going to be easy to do a clean job of it. I can see I'm going to have to do a rough shape then carefully scrape/sand it the rest of the way. The hardest part is going to be the pickup cutouts I reckon.

If I make a pigs ear of it I'll take the guitar and prototype scratchplate to TMT guitars in Orpington who specialise in making custom scratchplates and have them do it properly. I should probably skip straight to this step but I always like having a go at things myself.

When it comes to fitting to the guitar, if at all possible I'm going to avoid putting any holes in the top. I'll use the controls and pickup surround to hold the majority of it, perhaps with the help of some double sided tape near the cutaways.

Washburn #3 - 'EC29 Challenger' red

EC29s simply don't come up very often so when this one appeared on eBay I thought hard about picking it up. Then I thought about it the second time. Then the third. Finally when I think it had been on four times I bought it.

The reason for my reticence was that somebody had taken a chisel to it. The pickup cavity has been enlarged and the bridge pickup moved forward. There are also a few random holes in the top. It's been suggested it once had a Roland Hex Midi pickup fitted.

When I got it I found the pickup was barely supported. There were a couple of pieces of hacked up pencil roughly glued into the corners of the hole and the surround was kind of flapping around.

So I carefully tidied up the hole, cut a block of wood to fit and glued it in place. This isn't the tidiest of jobs but at least it's now sound and allowed me to put the pickup back in the original position.

It came with a Gibson bridge humbucker and unidentified single coil, the original active electronics having been long lost. The whole thing was very buzzy and rubbish so I immediately tidied it up and used it for a bit.

I was most impressed with the Gibson pickup it had a great hot-classic tone. After playing it a while I was still annoyed by the slightly iffy selector switch and took it apart to fix this. Unfortunately in doing so I killed the pickup, the tape protecting it was broken and I guess I damaged the windings manhandling it.

A little messing around trying to resurrect the pickup went nowhere so I ripped it all out and started again. This time I stuck in the Seymour Duncan JBJ and single coil that came in my KC90. I also did a 'progressive coil tap' circuit and it's now a nice versatile guitar.

I recently got an original Floyd Rose quite cheaply, which is nicer than the Washburn 600S tremolo it came with so I've swapped it in. I need to go back and sort the cosmetics out, I'm thinking of making up a scratchplate to cover the damage.

Washburn #1 - 'EC29 Challenger' in teal with squiggles

Nurse, fetch the spandex.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a 'guitar war' going on. Metal was big in the US, shredding was cool and the guitar manufacturers were falling over themselves to make more and more over the top models with super thin flat wide necks, active pickups, locking tremolos and crazy finishes.

It was this arms race that brought us the Ibanez Universe and this piece of shredder madness, the Washburn EC29 Challenger.

The luthier Stephen Davies had perfected making a guitar with no heel to the neck whatsoever by supporting the neck with the upper section of the body. Once you've done this, you can just keep sticking frets on until you run out of room. This he patented as the "Stephen's Extended Cutaway". He teamed up with Washburn who licensed his design and the EC29 and EC36 were born.

At its time the spec. was insane, 29 frets on a through neck, Reflex active pickups, redesigned Floyd Rose style locking tremolo with a quick release nut and a variety of very rock finishes. It was priced suitably highly and without a high profile endorsement they didn't sell.

When it came down to it, nobody really knew what to do with the extra frets, reviewers were nonplussed by them and any discussion of the guitar focused on them.

When shredding fell out of favour the 7-string guitars found a market in nu-metal and death metal but nobody wanted the ECs. So Washburn stopped making them and they disappeared, with only the Nuno Bettencourt models using a bolt-on version of the Stephens Extended Cutaway.

Come 1992, I'd got a reasonable job and wanted a good guitar. I remembered the launch of the ECs and was thinking about buying either one of these or a Universe. This was mostly because both appeared in my local guitar shop, Monkey Business Music in Romford, for a reasonable price.

The idea of a 7-string intimidated me slightly so I bought the EC29. What all the discussion of these missed at the time was that the ECs are simply fantastic guitars and there's no obligation whatsoever to use those extra frets.

The build quality of these is about the best Japan has to offer. Which in reality is about as good as you'll get anywhere beyond something individually handmade for you. The Reflex pickups were astounding and the tremolo rock solid.

The SEC means that when playing the usual questions about upper fret access become moot. There is just simply neck and more neck until you're trying to play well above about the 24th, which frankly you won't bother with. It's almost disconcerting as you lose the heel as a 'landmark'. The neck isn't quite as flat and wide as you'd expect either and it's a much more versatile guitar than the looks would suggest.

I played this heavily for years until I took my long break. When I came back the active circuit seemed to have failed where the wires went into it and as it's all potted there was nothing I could do about this. So I rewired it using some Kent Armstrongs, a Cool Rail at the neck, which is more like the middle position and a Motherbucker at the bridge.

This has resurrected it but it's not as nice sounding as it was. I have a plan to put Seymour Duncan Blackouts in it soon. This should be a good contrast to the passive Duncans in my other EC29.

Fiddling with the Washburns

The last couple of evenings I've been sorting out my Washburns. First up the red EC29 got the duff pot replaced. Sadly while doing this the Gibson bridge pickup that was in there seemed to fail with all the symptoms of a broken winding. I guess it's possible I tugged the wire and broke it but it seems a bit odd. I'd been very happy with this pickup and was surprised it was so good as I'd expected Gibson OEM stuff to be fairly lacklustre despite the high price tag on their guitars.

The dead pickup got replaced with a Seymour Duncan JBJ that came out of the KC90V when I bought it. It might not be F-spaced but it's the best 'classic rock' pickup I've got kicking around and will match the 'vintage hot' single coil in the neck position. Except it's really the middle position courtesy of the stupid length of the EC29 fretboard.

While I was in there I changed to a master volume/master tone/variable coil tap setup. This was at the suggestion of JayGee whose borrowing it prompted me to sort it out. If I was going to rewire it might as well try something new and it seems to work OK. Some day I'm going to have to do something about the cosmetics but for now I'll leave it as it is.

Next up I replaced the selector in the KC90V as it was knackered. I made a much tidier job than originally so I'm happier with it now.

Anyway, now to give the Goldtop some love.