The Chronicles of Guitarnia

Back to Business: Gretsch G5120

This is a perfectly good guitar:



This is a Gretsch G5120, and it is virtually brand new; when I took possession of it, it still had the plastic film on the truss rod cover. I traded my home-made Stratocaster for this guitar a few months ago, and it was unquestionably a win for me. Even though I built the Strat pretty much from scratch, using all bits and pieces selected by me with great consideration and forethought, I just never could seem to bond with it.

It happens.

I do have an affinity for Gretsch guitars, I will admit. The sparkly gold-top I started this blog thing with was a Gretsch Pro Jet, also acquired in a trade for one of my other home builds. Before that, one of my most prized possessions was a vintage Gretsch hollowbody, sold to pay for food, shelter and taxes last year. It was awesome and beautiful, but it needed work above my pay grade, and it had a fragile quality that I couldn’t get over. I was always a little hesitant to play it. And what good is a guitar you’re afraid to play, no matter how much you love it?

And, it was just a thing, just wood and wire. It had no soul, even though I could easily pretend that it did, because it was old (built in 1956), it had been around the block and survived, and had the scars to prove it, much like myself. But, still just a thing, and it had to go.

Anyway, now I have this new Gretsch, henceforth to be referred to as “the 5120,” and for now anyway, it’s my desert island guitar. If I had to get rid of all my guitars except one, this is the one I would keep. It plays effortlessly, and I think it’s quite attractive, as guitars go. For me, it’s just about perfect.

Which is why I’m going to take it apart and put it back together.

In many respects, like I said above, it’s just about perfect. So why do I want to start fucking around with it?

Because, besides my inability to leave well enough alone, I think that if I do, I can make it wholly perfect.

Well, not really, but I think I can make it pretty darn close. Here’s what I want to do:

• Swap out the somewhat lifeless stock Gretschbucker pickups for GFS Surf 90s, which are relatively inexpensive P-90 style pickups that I believe will give me a wonderfully retro rockabilly sound. Plus, they have a humbucker form-factor, and will drop right in without modification to the guitar.
• Swap the cheap tuning machines for some (again) relatively inexpensive Grover Sta-Tites, which will help keep the guitar in tune.
• Swap the Tune-o-Matic bridge for a aluminum Compton compensated one-piece bridge. It’s not expensive, sounds amazing, has retro-cool good looks, and will work better with the Bigsby tremolo.
• Carve a new bone nut, to replace the cheap plastic nut.
• Add a Les Paul style jack plate. For some unexplainable reason, the 5120 jack is mounted right in the thin wood on the side of the body. A jack plate costs like $2, and will keep me from destroying the guitar.

I think that’s pretty much it. We’ll see. I might build a new wiring harness; I’m sure the one that’s in there now is pretty lightweight, and probably uses some cheap components.

All in all, it will only be a moderate amount of work, and won’t really cost much money, which is a Good Thing. And I will end up with a really incredible rockabilly machine, that I can take with me to that desert island.

Your feelin’ the strength of the rump step up, hear the funk of the jump that the thugstas feel.

— Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

As my imaginary legions of worried readers have noticed, I haven’t updated the banjo project for quite a while. That is because, yeah, I have a life … kind of. Not that much of one, but enough to keep me busy, too busy to write the blog posts about my cheap banjo that you have come to know, love, and yearn for. I work, I eat, I attempt to sleep, and when I’m not doing those things, I sit in a funky and perpetual bad mood.

One slice in the pie chart of this funky bad mood consists of sitting on the couch and playing the same three guitar riffs that I’ve been playing for thirty years, over and over, as an annoying accompaniment to whatever is on TV. Occasionally my funk is interrupted by a short period of doing something “productive,” like working on an instrument, but the funk quickly overtakes the productivity, thereby obliterating any chance to write about it. Hence: no blog posts, and with sentences like the last one, maybe that’s for the best.

Well, here’s the good news: the banjo is finished (actually, it’s been finished for a long time). It worked out pretty well; it is playable and sounds kind of like a cheap but not completely shitty banjo should sound. The bad news, of course, is that I didn’t follow through and blog about it. I did take pictures along the way, but they don’t tell much of a story on their own. Yes, I have experienced a blog fail.

And so, what to do.

Like many other folks and their blogs, I could just abandon The Chronicles of Guitarnia completely and move on. It has certainly happened before. I had an anti-George W. Bush blog for quite a while several years ago, when emotions were running high, but I can’t imagine putting so much effort into something like that again. It was a worthwhile project though, and the only one I had a modicum of success with — with success loosely defined as having a number of regular readers. It made me feel like I was doing something for the common good.

Which is a load of crap of course; to do something useful for your fellow man requires you to actually *do* something, not just sit in front of your computer in your underwear and bitch. (Note: the underwear reference here is just for disturbing figurative effect; I actually was fully clothed throughout the entire Bush debacle, to the best of my recollection.)

But that blog was at least therapeutic for me, and it helped me to define and clarify my own thoughts. And I think that is what blogs are best used for. A blog that no one reads is at least mostly as successful as one that is popular, because it helps the author to think things through in a way that they otherwise might not.

So, the banjo is done and sits awaiting some action. The blog will never be done, and sits awaiting some action. The funk abides.

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

— Karl Kraus

I’m back.

It is my duty and privilege as a marginally over-educated American white man to blog about something that no one else gives a rat’s ass about, and it’s hard to think of something more appropriate than a crappy old banjo. So let’s dig up this hillbilly objet d’art and see what happens.

If you recall (and surely you do), last time I was blathering about how tightening the bracket hooks to a reasonable torque (i.e., a level of tightness that allows the banjo head to be at least somewhat musical sounding) results in the bracket shoe tilting and digging into the ersatz mahogany wood of the head rim, a precursor to tearing out of the wood entirely and adding to the world’s supply of semi-expensive kindling. Apparently mahogany from China is somewhere between talcum powder and balsa on the Rockwell hardness scale.

Oh, what to do? Well, there are undoubtedly many ways to improve this situation, the most sensible of which would be to give this thing to someone with a fireplace, but I have chosen something different, easy, and hopefully effective.

I want to spread out the mechanical force that’s causing the shoe to dig into the wood, and I think I can do this simply by replacing the tiny, cheap washers under the shoes with something that, while equally cheap, has a larger surface area.

(Parenthetical aside: Think of it this way: if I wanted to balance a bowling ball on something, to amaze and amuse mental patients, I could use a multitude of different things to do it with. I could balance the ball on a big slab of wood, which would work fine, but would not be particularly amazing. Or I could balance it on a big nail, which would also be fine, but would most likely dig a big hole into the kitchen table. Using a nail would be more impressive certainly, but not for very long. Spreading the force out with this hypothetical slab of wood would be less impressive, but more effective and long-lasting. The hypothetical mental patients would undoubtedly prefer the nail, but that is neither here nor there.)

So, big, clunky and not amazing, or briefly amazing but destined for failure. Choices, choices…

Obviously, I’m going to go with clunky and non-amazing. All I have to do is replace the tiny and ineffective washers with big Soviet-style utilitarian ones, and I’ll be able to tighten that sucker down like nobody’s business.

And so I did. Here I am putting a washer on the outside of the rim, between the shoe and the wood:



I will put some nice big washers on the inside of the rim as well:



Whee, only 20 more to go! Did I mention that banjos have lots of parts?

A-ha, you shout inappropriately, you’ve got a big problem, monkey-man! Adding the width of two washers will result in the bracket shoe bolt being too short. Ha! You think I am that stupid? If you recall, and I’m certain that you do, I made a trip to the Chinese metric section of the hardware store and bought a bunch of cheap parts. Some of these cheap parts just happen to be Chinese metric bolts that are about a quarter of an inch longer than the originals. So there you have it. The longer bolts, combined with the width of the two washers, works out more or less perfectly for our application.

And now, loosen, tighten, loosen, tighten, ad nauseum. Next time: man, I don’t know. I think it’s getting pretty close to being done. Almost…

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Like I said before, this banjo is cheap, i.e., inexpensive, because of the cheap components used in the Chinese youth prison camps where these are assembled.

Fortunately, it’s fairly cheap & easy to fix some of these problems just by replacing some of the low-quality nuts and bolts. Unfortunately, certain parts are specific to banjos and some are not.

Just a side note here; pardon my digression: I just have to note that banjos are comprised of about a half-million parts, as opposed to an acoustic guitar, which has very few parts that you can easily work with - mainly just the tuners, nut, truss rod and bridge.

A banjo, on the other hand, as I already said, has a couple billion parts. Perhaps I exaggerate a micron or two, but a banjo has the tuners, bridge, truss rod and nut, but also has a boatload of screws, washers, clips, and retainers, not to mention the head, rim, tailpiece, resonator, armrest, bridge, tone ring, bracket hooks, bracket shoes… the list goes on. You could take apart a banjo and fit most of it into a box, and no one would know what it was.

So what’s my point? I kind of forget, but it is something along the lines of, you can replace a lot of the cheap parts easily at the hardware store, but some cheap parts would need to be replaced by ordering them from a luthier supply store and paying a bunch of money. And for this cheap banjo, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

Case in point: bracket parts. The bracket shoes and hooks, along with a metal ring, are what hold the head (the big white round thing) to the body of the banjo. They, in turn, are held in place with bolts and washers, in this case, cheap undersized Chinese bolts and washers. These I can replace with a trip to the hardware store. But why would I want to? Here’s why:



It’s a little hard to see, but fortunately little white arrows appeared floating in the air, and just happened to point to the problem areas.

The purpose of the hooks is to hold the head on and allow for adjustability in terms of the tightness or looseness of the head, just like on a drum. The purpose of the bracket show is to anchor the hook to the body of the banjo. If the banjo head is too loose, the banjo sounds floppy and flubbery, like a shoebox with rubber bands. If it is too tight, the banjo sounds too bright and shrill, like your ex-wife. But, it has to be pretty tight to sound decent. So what happened when I started tightening the brackets on this cheap Chinese banjo, in order to brighten up the sound of this fabulous instrument? As you can hopefully see in this photo, the bracket shoe can’t handle the torque, and starts tilting and digging into the wood on one side, and lifting up on the other. If I were to keep tightening, it would pull the shoe right off the body.

Here is a view of the inside of the banjo body, showing the inadequate bolts and tiny locking washers on the inside of the wooden rim, and the bracket shoes, holding the bracket hooks, on the outside:



Being a highly-trained mechanical engineer (in my own mind), I think I have a plan that will allow me to fix this situation without ordering a bunch of expensive parts. A trip to the Chinese metric fasteners aisle at the hardware store is order (yes, there really is a Chinese metric section). Why Chinese metric? Because I don’t want to replace the actual bracket shoes, which are threaded to this specification. Are you picking up what I’m laying down?

My goodness, this is boring to write about, so I’m sure it’s even worse to read about, so I’m going to stop here and continue this repair later, after we both wake up.

I’m a nut case, but that is what I believe.

— Mike Tyson

Busy busy busy, that’s what I am. Me and Mike, a couple of nut cases, but we believe. I don’t know what he believes in, but on the other hand, I’m not sure what I believe in either.

On the third hand (because I’m less than an hour drive to West Virginia), I do know that the nut of any stringed instrument is a critical component in how the instrument will sound and how easy it will be to play. The nut on this Kay banjo is a piece of crap, and it makes a difference. It is made of what looks like the cheapest molded plastic-y substance they could find.

And this is how manufacturers make cheap instruments: by using the lowest quality components they can get their filthy, money-grubbing hands on (and also by having underfed Chinese slave boys work 20 hours a day putting things together, but that’s a subject for someone else’s blog).

Anyway, this nut sucks the wazoo and needs to be replaced. Fortunately, this is cheap, if not entirely easy to fix. The traditional nut material for good-quality banjos (so I’ve read) is mother-of-pearl, which if you didn’t know, is the inside part of an abalone shell. An abalone is some giant variety of disgusting bivalve mollusk. Abalone meat is considered a delicacy in East Asian countries, so you know it will probably poison and kill white people; therefore, to me it is only good for banjo nuts, and buttons. Maybe.

Here is the original nut on the left, and a mother-of-pearl blank, purchased for a couple of bucks on eBay, on the right:



Unfortunately, abalone don’t spit out perfectly shaped banjo nuts, so a little work is going to be required. Stupid abalone.

So how do I know how to shape the new nut? By looking at the old one. To do that, I have to first remove it from the banjo. This is done with delicate precision combined with brute force. Here I am scoring around the edge of the old nut with a razor blade, so that when I pop out the nut it doesn’t take any of the finish (or fretboard) with it:



With the delicate precision part out of the way, I proceed gleefully to the brute force step, in which I hammer the nut out laterally with a screwdriver:



A nut will usually pop right out, because quality instrument makers just hold them in place with a dab of glue, knowing that eventually every nut will wear out and need to be replaced. Unfortunately for me, the Kay banjo is not a quality instrument, and I had to beat the shit out of the nut to get it loose. But loose it did come, and very little damage occurred. Lucky, lucky me. Here is the old nut, with some of the neck wood still clinging to it:



I said I was going to use the old nut as a template, and I meant it. Here I am marking the outline of the old nut onto the nice chunk of abalone:



This is only to get the rough dimension laid out; there wouldn’t be much point in making a nice new nut shaped exactly like the old crappy nut, would there? Once I get a very rough shape, the real fun starts. Here is the world’s greatest invention, the mighty Dremel, cutting the mother-of-pearl blank to approximately the right size:



Now the fun part. I start shaping the nut to a … nut shape with some 150-grit sandpaper on a sanding block. From here on in, patience is the key. There are no shortcuts, sad to say. Here, the new nut is rough-sanded to about the right shape. The new nut is the bottom piece:



The string spacing on the original nut was a little tight for my sausage fingers, so I am taking measurements from another nut that I had laying around to mark the string slots:



I marked the new nut (on the right) with pencil. Then it is time to break out the nuclear-powered Hiroshima nut files, and make some starter grooves:



Here is a nut file, which features a nuclearized mutant fish larger than the entire Earth!



Run! Run! Where is Mothra, friend of the children???

Where was I? Oh yeah. Here is a top view of the nut, in which I have just started filing some of the grooves for the strings:



Those little arrows show the starter grooves.

So, I continue sanding, filing grooves, test fitting, until my eyes begin to roll down my face. This mother-of-pearl stuff is mother-of-pearl-fucking hard. Much harder than bone, which is the traditional material for guitar nuts. But, it sure is pretty when it’s polished up.

Here is the (nearly) finished product:



It is only nearly finished because it can’t be completely finished until it is on the banjo with strings on. At that point I will fine-tune the string slots so that the string height at the first fret is correct. But that will come much later, my friends. Before I install this nice shiny nut, I am going to level and crown the frets, which on this particular banjo, are in particularly bad shape.

More soon.

The greatest stories are those that resonate our beginnings and intuit our endings, our mysterious origins and our numinous destinies, and dissolve them both into one.

— Ben Okri

The first thing I’m going to tackle on this baby is the resonator. What’s a resonator? Surprisingly, it is something that resonates, and in this case, it is the removable round wooden back piece that resonates with the sound produced by the strings vibrating over the top of the banjo.

As is clear, I am not an expert in the world of banjos, but I’m reasonably certain that the resonator is there mainly to make the banjo louder. This is important because a banjo is an acoustic, i.e., not artificially amplified, instrument, traditionally played in a group of other acoustic instruments, such as guitars, fiddles and mandolins. Historically, it is interesting to note that the custom of any given musician wanting to be the loudest player in any given band did not originate with rock ‘n’ roll.

The other purpose of a resonator, I believe, is to alter the tone of the sound coming from the banjo, hopefully for the better. That’s why resonators are usually made from nice tone woods, such as mahogany or maple, as opposed to plastic, cast iron, tin or recycled diapers.

This particular resonator looks like mahogany to me, but I could be mistaken. I can say for certain that it is wood and not plastic, but I have to believe that it is not the highest quality or most sought-after of banjo resonators. I plinked around the strings a bit with the resonator removed, and I think that maybe this banjo sounds better without it. I have not conducted any scientific comparisons though, so I’ll leave this mystery unsolved for now and proceed with fixing this component, hoping for the best.

So, you may ask, what’s wrong with this resonator? Well, until I started messing with it, nothing. However, after I removed it for inspection, and then started putting it back on, I noticed that the bushings (an incorrect term for these parts, but I don’t know what else to call them) were loose in their mounting holes. They were so loose, in fact, that when I tightened the bolts back down, I pulled them right out of the wood. Nice!



And so, because it’s an easy fix, and because I’m not sure where else to start, let’s get these little fuckers firmly mounted in the rim of the resonator.

I first considered using wood glue mixed with sawdust, as it would be a pretty invisible fix, but upon further review, decided that a) it wouldn’t be strong enough to hold for any length of time, and b) they won’t be visible anyway, so I might as well use something that I have great confidence in, which is epoxy glue.

Epoxy, here in the form of JB Weld brand goop (along with duct tape and razor blades) is one of the world’s greatest inventions, with the ability to fix almost anything. It is thick and will fill all the cracks and imperfections of the wood, and will hold the little nubs of the bushings tightly, preventing them from popping loose. It will dry hard as a rock without shrinking.

I mixed the epoxy in roughly equal amounts from each tube, which chemically activates the sticky goodness. I then have a decent amount of time to work with before it starts to harden.

Here is one of the bushings, with the mixed epoxy applied liberally, about to get reset into the hole:



Then it’s just a simple matter of press-fitting the bushings in, and wiping off the excess with a wet paper towel.




And now I wait. A full day should do it, but since I’m not in a hurry, I’ll just let it sit until I’m ready to put it back on, which will be a while. Once the epoxy cures, nothing short of a hammer and chisel is going to get it out of there.

Next up: I go nuts!

I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words.

— Theodore Bikel

There are so many great banjo quotes that I am having a hard time picking one to use for the start of this project. Beck says “Set your guitars and banjos on fire and before you write a song smoke a pack of whiskey and it’ll all take care of itself.” That’s a good one, I think. Daniel Roth says “Nothing says ‘dropping out of society’ like learning the banjo,” which I think is pretty funny and probably true.
 
I like any kind of stringed musical instrument, whether I can play it or not. I admire the people who, whether they have some natural talent or not, work so hard and with such dedication and passion that they can produce beautiful sounds with their instruments: banjos, guitars, guitarrón mexicanos, violins, cellos, dulcimers, bajos, mandolins, violas, bouzoukis, and most especially big old doghouse basses. And probably a couple of hundred more that I can’t think of or don’t know about.
 
If a song doesn’t have a guitar or some other plucked strings in it, I probably won’t like it. Not a horn guy, which I know makes me unsophisticated, but so be it. I was forced to pick up the clarinet in the fifth grade, which lasted about a week before I disappointed my parents. I thought it might be cool, because my dad actually won some kind of state competition for clarinet when he was in high school in the corn fields of southern Illinois, but it just did not float my boat. Sorry dad.
 
But give me some strings to bend, and I’m happy.
 
So when I had an opportunity to get a banjo, as a trade of course, I went for it. I actually love bluegrass music, much to the dismay of those close to me. A hard-driving bluegrass band in full swing is a fucking awesome thing to behold, and rocks in a way that, say, a “power ballad” by a classic rock band just never can. Maybe it is my hillbilly heritage; perhaps it’s in my genes. I come from a long line of skinny old stooped-over men with big feet, knobby fingers and bobbing adam’s apples, men whose lives afforded them little sophisticated entertainment, but who could rock the shack with a beat-up guitar (or clarinet) and the sole of their right foot.
 
A banjo purist would reject this particular ungainly oddity because it has six strings instead of five. It’s a mutated noisemaker that is the bastard love child of a guitar and a bluegrass banjo, sometimes called a “banjitar.” You can tune it like a guitar is tuned, and play it like a guitar, but my goal, once it is playable, is to go old school, with an open-G tuning and some wildly sloppy fingerpicking.
 

 
It’s a Kay brand banjo. Kay is an old company that is famous for making affordable student-grade instruments, and when someone with a certain amount of knowledge hears the brand name, they assume that what you have is a not-very-good instrument. And in general, those people are absolutely correct. It’s certainly true in this case. Kay is probably responsible for more people quitting music lessons than any other company, because of the frustration that cheap instruments produce in beginning players.

This is not a high-quality instrument — and of course, I will be going into its many deficiencies in great detail in the weeks to come — but then, why would I want to spend a bunch of money on a high-quality banjo? For me, it is just something to play with, to learn and have fun with, and most importantly, to take apart and put back together, leaving it a better instrument than when I first set eyes on it.
 
What I’d like to prove with this banjo is that, even though it is an inexpensive instrument, it can be transformed into something decent and playable. Something that won’t sound terrible to the average ear. Something that sounds more or less like a banjo.
 
Unfortunately, at the moment it sounds kind of like a shoebox with some rubber bands stretched over it, and it is about as easy to play. Here is a partial list of the things that I will try to address:

• remove and reset studs/bushings in the resonator
• carve a new nut out of abalone (mother of pearl)
• install new, decent quality tuning machines
• level & crown the frets

What’s a resonator? What’s wrong with the existing nut? If you’ll bear with me, you will find out soon, and you and I may learn something together. 

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

— Truman Capote

I’m pretty sure Truman was commenting on writing rather than reading, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a great quote.

Finished for now, and while no thing is ever perfect or complete, the good currently outweighs the bad and my fingers long to bend some wire and produce a sound or two. And though most people I know well would rather listen to me fixing a guitar than playing one, the time has come to enjoy the fruits of my labors.

The ground wire is firmly in place under the Bigsby, and the bridge is in place and works better than I ever expected. Strings have been strung, and while there are still some dings and dents, and while I can’t find the tiny screws for the truss rod cover, I am nevertheless feeling a pleasant sense of satisfaction at what this guitar has become. All it took was a few dollars here and there, and some patience and time. As I grow older and work slower, I make fewer mistakes, and I bleed less. A couple of the few and rare benefits of time passing.

When I first received this Gretsch, I could not play it for more than a minute without it going out of tune because of the strings hanging up on the bridge. Using the Bigsby was nigh impossible. The intonation was impossible to adjust to a level of acceptability.

And now, I have this:



Of course there are still some things I might do one day. Or I might not. I have a graphite nut, guaranteed to eliminate string binding, but so far I haven’t had any trouble with that happening. That could indeed change, if I switch to a different string gauge, but for now it works fine.

I might refurbish the pickguard sometime, or I might not. It would cover up a couple of dings, but I do kind of like the look of it like this.

So what is it like to play now? I will be honest: it is far, far better than I ever expected. Leveling and crowning the frets made a huge difference in how low I can adjust the strings, and I am absolutely in love with the rocking bar bridge. It is such a simple thing really, just a tube of nickel-plated aluminum, but it works incredibly well. I can push the tremolo all the way down, as far as it will go, and then yank it back up, doing my best Setzer imitation, and the strings fall right back into tune for the next chord. I don’t think I’ve ever had a guitar that would return to pitch as well as this does now.

It’s a pretty simple guitar. While she is pretty new, all of the technology employed on her is well over a half-century old, and works just about perfectly.

It’s a good feeling.

So what’s next in Guitarnia? Fear not, faithful companion, for there are always new projects on the horizon. I have an especially silly one that I will reveal shortly. But for now, I think I will take a short break, until that next little brown package arrives in the mail from the parts store, and enjoy my guitar.

The whole concept of ‘grounding’ children is utterly stupid - they just go off and rebel and don’t like you.

— Kate Winslet

You know, I just noticed that Tumblr is removing the apostrophes and other punctuation from my post titles. If you have already noticed this, rest assured that I am not as stupid as I might seem from this phenomenon. At least, not about punctuation.

Anyway.

Believe it or not, things are coming together pretty quickly now. I really just need to button up a few things, put on some strings, and then sit in a suicidal funk for a month because I don’t have a project to work on.

Actually, there are a few things I’d still like to do: I’d like to install a good quality graphite nut (the slotted piece that the strings pass over on their way to the tuners); this will help to eliminate any string binding that might occur during and after any semi-vigorous use of the Bigsby. When a string binds in the nut, the guitar goes out of tune. And that (staying in tune) is the number one problem with tremolo-equipped guitars.

There are all kinds of tremolo mechanisms that have been invented and are in use on guitars, but in my opinion, the Bigsby is still the simplest and most reliable tremolo in existence. Guitar tech nerds have tried forever to make something better, that will not cause the guitar to go out of tune after use, but they are all trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Guitars go out of tune because the strings stick in the nut slots, or on the bridge. I’ve already addressed the bridge issue; it’s impossible for the strings to bind on the new bridge. However the current nut is still an issue.

On the other hand, the nut on this guitar isn’t as bad as some, and I can live with it for a little while. I think.

See, the problem with taking your guitar apart to fix it up is that you can’t play it while it’s in 100 pieces on your desk. And sometimes you just want to play the damn thing. So you learn to live with a few minor issues, until you get all OCD, and decide that something Must Be Fixed.

Well, that was a pleasant little digression. I’m actually here this evening to talk about a simple, yet potentially frustrating little detail that has to be dealt with.

In this photo, you can see a bare wire sticking up out of one of the old bridge post holes. This wire originates at the volume potentiometer (aka, the volume knob), and connects electronically to the strings via the bridge. It is a ground wire, and if it’s not there, your guitar will buzz like a futha-mucka when you plug it in.



But wait, you cry repugnantly, you plugged these holes with hardwood dowels many episodes ago. What happened to the ground wire?

This is what happened: I pulled it back through the guitar body and into the control cavity, accessible from the back of the guitar. The idea is that, since I don’t have a regular metal bridge mounted to the guitar, I have to find another way to ground the strings. So what other metal piece of this guitar touches the strings? That’s right: the Bigsby. Therefore, I will relocate the ground wire so that it attaches to the Bigsby.

In this photo, I drilled through the top of the guitar at a spot that will be: a) covered by the Bigsby, and b) accessible from the control cavity. Then I took a hunk of thin wire, and shoved it through the hole:



I will take the bare part of this wire and wrap it around one of the mounting screws for the tremolo. Boom, strings grounded. Boom-boom, out go the lights.

Here is the view from the back, showing the original ground wire pulled from the bridge stud back into the control cavity, now twisted together with the new wire poked through from the top of the guitar.



I’ll solder these together and wrap some electrical tape around the connection. I will do this because I suck. The right way to do it would be to desolder the old ground wire from the volume pot, and solder the new one in its place. But, there are a couple reasons I don’t do this.

First, I am lazy. Second, there are several wires soldered to the volume pot which I don’t want to disconnect, and if I start desoldering this one, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll wind up either disconnecting the other ones, or burning up the potentiometer itself.

And you know what? I don’t care, because afterwards it will work just fine, and the back of the guitar will look like this:



So there.

Next up: I will just screw the Bigsby back on, making sure that the ground wire is making a good connection with the mounting screws. Then this old girl is ready for strings and a nice set-up.

Pickup lines are a major turn-off, they don’t work on me and I tune them out. It’s better to just be honest. (Part Three)

— Kim Smith

Yes, I am a bad blogger, but let’s let bygones be bygones. Does anyone know what a “bygone” is, by the way? If so, I’d like mine back, please.

Regardless, I’m back and trying to write a post detailing my progress, before I fall asleep at the wheel of this computer.

Last post found our guitar starting to look a little more like a guitar, with the pickups mounted on newly installed supports. The problem now is that there are huge ugly gaps around the new pickups, which are obviously not the same size as the old original ones. So now I have to install the pickup rings, whose sole purpose in life is to hide the aforementioned gaps. The rings have no structural significance, so mounting them with stainless steel bolts and nuts isn’t really necessary. If you recall, and I’m sure you do, the previous owner (PO) had installed pickup rings, but since he installed the pickups rather poorly, crooked and askew, the pickup rings were similarly offensive in appearance. The mounting holes in the pickup rings are near the corners, and the PO used long screws, short screws, black screws, silver screws, standard screws and phillips head screws, without any regard as to what he was screwing into.

This affects the sound and playability of the guitar to an incredible degree. Well, no, not really, but it was lame and stupid, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it every time I picked up the guitar.

And so, after several minutes of extensive and grueling research (Google), I found that the proper way to mount the rings was to fill the gaps to the edges of the pickup cavities, to give the proper screws (which are tiny) something to bite into. And so, with not much effort, I fitted the gaps with wood shims, as seen here:



The shims are glued flush with the top of the guitar, and leave a bit of room for vertical adjustment of the pickups. If I ever want to change pickups again, I can just pop them out with a lever of some kind, like a screwdriver or perhaps the royal scepter from the emperor of Lilliput. Whichever is handy.

And so, after letting the glue dry, I drilled some tiny pilot holes (because that’s the right way to install screws, and that’s how we roll here in Guitarnia) and attached the pickkup rings. Much better, I think, than the previously mentioned gnarly gaps:



And here is a shot of the guitar with both rings on. Much better, in my ever-so-humble opinion:

And thus ends the saga of the crooked pickups. Next time: removing the Bigsby and grounding the strings! Can you just hardly not wait? Of course you can’t.