Strat All Done

Well, here it is . . .

I built this "Schallercaster" guitar as a contrast to my "Yamacaster" (Yamaha Pacifica). I was looking for a jazz/latin/blues sound and had some Schaller Golden 50's pickups lying around with nothing to do. I had bought the neck some time back, was it a Mighty Mite? - I forget. The neck is of the wider variety and pretty flat, thereby suiting my long fingers. The body was bought from the now-defunct Mars Music for 50 bucks. It was a refurbished job and I think they said it was a Cort. However the neck end had extra holes for tilt-neck adjusters, so who knows?

A quick test into the Roland Jazz Chorus 77, showed that the electric sound was as expected - very similar to Seymour Duncan '59's. The pickups have the Alnico V magnets - some find them to be "gutless" but they are clear-sounding with every string audible on chords. Because I had not completed the set-up, the bitch just would not tune up - so it sounded pretty un-musical to the ear. For example, the 3rd string played at the first fret was at least a 1/4 tone sharp. Ouch.

On with the set-up. First, the string grooves in the nut were finalized. A book I have says to have the string just touch the first fret when you push it down between the second and third frets. I stopped a little short of that and also left the wound strings a little higher because I use hybrid gauges 9, 11, 16, 26, 36, 46. Next I set the bridge heights until the strings buzzed slightly at the 12th fret because the neck has a little too much bow and I have to take the neck off to adjust the frikkin inaccessible truss rod. Following that little exercise, I adjusted the rollers on the bridge to set the string widths equal and lined up with the neck.

Next, I plugged the guitar into the trusty ZOOM 707 and adjusted each string's intonation by pinging the 1st harmonic and making the fingered 12th fret show the same. After tuning the guitar using the ZOOM's tuner, I casually struck a bottom E chord and damn near wet my pants, it sounded so good. I fretted an A at the fifth, still good and even E at the 12th - still good! All the chord shapes sounded good enough too, without that flat sound on the 3rd string when playing a bottom C for example.

As you would expect with a hard-tail bridge, string bending is easy and also using the finger to produce vibrato, like classical guitar players, works well. I notice too that this guitar has much louder harmonics on each string compared to the Yamacaster. This is good from the point of having a brightly textured sound but not so good if the strings go out of tune :-(

best regards,

Ted

Strat Step 04

Hello guitar-pickers,

Time for a bit wiring action . . .

Here's the pickguard with the stuff installed but not yet wired. It's a custom leftie from Warmouth. I added two extra holes between the pickups for extra pickup support. Just one volume and one tone control, it's all I need. I'm looking for a Gibson sound - but without having to reach down there to mess with all those 4 knobs and then up there to flip the switch. Too much for my tired old brain ;-)

Two 500K pots (well 470K actually) and a simple 3-way switch. The pots are positioned thus so that I can solder the highs together after a bit of bending (saves a link and is perhaps more reliable). I'll also bend the lows back and solder them to the pot body. This gives a little extra shielding to the pot wiper inside.

You gotta have a plan. Seriously, it goes a lot better if you do a schematic AND a wire routing diagram. Then you can do stuff like hi-lite each connection as it is soldered, etc plus you can scan and save it as a record.

Pickguard wiring completed and checked out OK. With the pots turned up, read about 8K on the vol pot wiper to pot body when the switch is in the bridge position, just under 4K in the middle and about 7K in the neck position. Setting the multimeter to mV and pulling a magnet away from each pickup gave a momentary positive voltage for each one, so they're in phase. Doing that now is so much better than discovering they are out of phase after plugging the guitar into an amp! As you can see, the coil tap wires (brown&white) still need to be insulated.

Later, I'll be connecting the ground wire from the bridge and the shielded cable from the output jack, leaving about 10" length for ease of fitting or removing the pickguard assembly.

Best Regards,

Ted

Strat Step 03

Hello guitar-pickers,

More progress this week. Even had some strings on for a while!

Put the Schaller machines on - silky smooth feel. The holes were 3/8" but, being German, the post sleeves are 10mm - so a bit of filing was needed. I don't like the string tree on the 5th & 6th strings, it will be removed. Too steep an angle over the nut and heavy string wear - even just installing them seriously flattened some windings.

Got the neck bolted on. Fortunately the plate holes lined up with the existing ones in the body. Pity that the truss adjuster is buried in there now. No way I'm going bore an access hole in the body behind the neck pickup.

Here's the pickguard I'll be using. It's a Warmoth custom. They have a a great option selection form and your item is built from your choices. I chose Pearlite, 11-hole, two knobs, leftie, two standard humbuckers. It's great looking.

The Schaller Golden 50's bridge pickup. It'll be mounted with the adjustable poles toward the neck. I may use Schaller 2in1's eventually, because they have two rows of adjustable poles giving a better shot at good string balance.

Next job is to assemble and then wire up the pickguard. Should be fun, but I've done it before many times, so I don't expect problems. I'll be using 500K log. pots a là Gibson and a 0.022 uF capacitor. Just a 3-way Strat style switch, no fancy coil-switching on this job ;-)

Best Regards,

Ted

Strat Step 02

Hello guitar-pickers,

The next step was to fill in the pre-existing tremolo hole in the body. I will be fitting a Schaller hard-tail (non-tremolo) bridge. Full of promise, the saddles are adjustable sideways - in addition to the usual up/down and back/forward. By that means, the string spread will be made perfect and then locked in place with the built-in cam screw.

So, I'll be needing to fill the big tremolo hole where the bridge fixing screws will go.

I had some Yaupon Holly stacked for burning, dried about two years. Yaupon is much like oak - very hard and tough with a fine grain. It grows on my place like weeds. So I cut this piece to go in from underneath (the trem hole has a lip which, in retrospect, I should have removed).

Glued it in with carpenter's white glue.

Then I made another piece to fill in the top.

Now I'm full of admiration for people who can "dutch" holes in furniture.

A bit of wood filler fixed my rough edges!

A lick of black enamel - looks horrible. I'll try some better stuff tomorrow.

P.S. I did try some other enamel but the thinner I used blistered the existing paint. I'm not going to try and fix that - it makes no difference to the sound. So I just sanded it level with 220 grit paper.

Best Regards,

Ted

Strat Step 01

Hello guitar-pickers,

I'm building a Strat-style from bits and pieces. Many of the bits were made by Schaller, in what was West Germany. Since my "Yamacaster" (Pacifica)has been reverted back to single-pole for the neck and middle pickups, I'm going to go Les Paul and use a pair of Schaller Golden 50's humbuckers combined with a Schaller 475 hard-tail bridge. The machines are also by Schaller so, now, I am formally introducing my xpatUSA Schallercaster!
I'll publish progress in a series of posts called "strat step 01" et. subs. I might put a news feed up on my website so that people can put it in their NewsReader if they so desire. So, here we go with the first post . . .

My new neck came without a nut, so it was off to Bellville meat market to get one of these . . .

After leaving it outside for a good while, I cut the middle piece out. Gross, the rotting marrow inside still stunk to high heaven, so my wife kindly boiled it clean.

Next, an 18-point tenon-saw was used to slice off a piece about 3/16". More stench!

After much fret-sawing and filing down to 1/8" thick, here it is

At first, slotting the nut looked like it would be a simple job. Ya know, just figure the required spread of the strings and divide by 5. However, a little Googling revealed that equal spacing between the slots slot is old hat and that the modern way is to have an equal gap between the string edges. Fortunately my math is still up to such complex subjects and the internet has some string-spacing calculators anyway. Also, Stewart-Macdonald has a nifty ruler which increases each spacing by 0.004" as you go from treble to bass. We'll see . . .


The next job is to fill in the pre-existing tremolo hole in the body. I will be fitting a Schaller hard-tail (non-tremolo) bridge for which (of course) the fixing screws go right where the big tremolo hole is.


Best Regards,

Ted

WebSite: http://kronometric.org

Rectangular Watch Proportions

I like vintage rectangular watches, popularized by Cartier in the form of their famous "tank" watch. Have you ever wondered how watch designers come up with the proportions, e.g. dial width x height, used in that kind of watch? After all, a rectangle can be virtually a square or, at the other extreme, almost a line! Surely their bosses didn't just say "draw me a dial for our latest answer to le tanque"?

The literature of Art and Architecture makes much of the importance of correct proportions. It turns out that the most referred-to proportions have been popular since the time of the ancient Greeks. The Greek philosophers, in particular Pythagorus, spent a lot of effort on the subject of geometry. They arrived at a set of pleasing proportions that can be created using simple geometric figures and therefore by ordinary drawing instruments.

Could a geometric method have been used by a latter-day draftsman to construct his dial drawing ready for use by the screen-printing department?

Pythagorus came up with three kinds of proportions: Arithmetic, Geometric and Harmonic. You can read more about those here. These proportions or "means" can be calculated but, more importantly, they can be drawn using simple drawing instruments such as rulers or compasses. If we were to consider the numbers 1 and 2 and find out what the three possible means are, that would give us three easily-drawn ratios. They work out as follows:

The arithmetic mean of 1 and 2 is 1.5, a proportion of 2:3. Easy enough to draw: Make a square and divide it into quarters. Draw a line through the diagonal of one of the quarters and continue until it meets the extension of one side of the square (see construction at right).

The geometric mean of 1 and 2 is 1.414: Draw a square with a side equal to the required width. Then use dividers to measure the diagonal and use them to mark the required height.

The harmonic mean of 1 and 2 is 1.333. To be exact, it's 1-1/3 and can also be represented by the proportion 3:4: Split a square in two and then split one of the resulting rectangles in two along it's length and "remove" the outer part.

Be that as it may, I then measured the aspect ratios of the outside edges of the watch dial minutes chapters for which I have pictures. I measured the chapters because these are probably both the starting point and the main feature of any dial design. I leveled them up in PhotoShop and then measured the minutes chapters width and height in pixels. Dividing the height by the width gave me an aspect ratio, i.e. the proportional mean. Whilst bearing in mind experimental errors with this method, here are the results:

These two have the arithmetic proportions; the Jurgensen measured at exactly 2:3

This one was close-ish to geometric at 1.39:

This one was exactly harmonic:

These non-pythagoreans came in at an easily drawn 1.25 which, by the way, is a popular aspect ratio for photographic printing, e.g 8 by 10:

The one below, at 1.7, looks skinny and appears not to fit any known arty-crafty criterion, not even the oft-quoted golden ratio. However, 1.7 is extremely close to 1.666, i.e. a proportion of 3:5 which can be drawn similarly to the previous method:



Note also that the numbers 3,5 are sequential members of the Fibonacci series which, at it's limit, does indeed equal the Golden Ratio.

I conclude that many designers used easily-drawn geometric proportions for dial art-work but did not necessarily adhere to just the three classic Pythagorean means. In Japanese architecture, rooms were often sized by the fit of standard tatami mats which themselves were 3ft by 6ft i.e. 1:2. Different arrangements and numbers of mats used resulted in various proportions, including our 2:3, 3:4 and 4:5 but apparently not 3:5. However, the Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) did include the proportion 3:5 in his "The Four Books on Architecture" as one of the seven "most beautiful and proportionable manners of rooms". Not to be outdone, the 20th century French architect Le Corbusier came up with a "Modulor" tool that allowed the drafting of dimensions that were all proportioned according to the Golden Ratio.

Best regards,
xpatUSA

Re-painting bezel markers and watch hands

It's not too hard (assuming that the bezel marks are engraved). Use Tesors or Humbrol modeling enamel and some really good quality fine artist's brushes. Here's my Longines Weems bezel, before and after.

Paint the marks and numbers, doesn't matter if you go over the edge of the engraving. Wait until the paint gets tacky. Wet, but do not soak, a cloth in thinners or acetone. A nap-free cloth is best, e.g. an old cotton shirt. Wipe the bezel quickly one time in a circular motion around it (to cross the markers, not run along them). Don't press too hard i.e. you must let the solvent remove the excess enamel rather than scraping it off with the cloth. Don't go back and try to remove the inevitable smear or two. Wait for the paint to dry, preferably overnight. Then remove the smears, again with a one-shot quick motion. If you have go over a smear again, wait for for the solvent/enamel to dry completely before wiping again.

Hands are best removed, wiped with solvent and then mounted (upside down for hours & minutes hands with missing lume) onto cocktail sticks pushed into a lump of Rodico. You have to work fast, not allowing the enamel to dry. You might want to thin it just a little. The enamel must flow from the brush onto the hand. Put some enamel in a cap. Don your jeweler's loupe, pick the finest brush you've got and load it with enamel. From the base of the hand outward, run the brush along in ONE stroke. Do NOT go back and re-touch it. If it doesn't look right, remove the paint immediately and do it again.

A little practice before helps a lot!

Best regards,

xpatUSA