Post by axekicker on Jun 16, 2010 15:06:43 GMT -5
For someone who can play guitar, bass, drums and piano, I’m surprisingly useless when it comes to building things or doing home renovations and the like. I think it has to do with a pathological lack of patience, and having a brain that’s just not wired for it. But I do love tinkering with guitars and I’m slowly learning the boundaries of the craft. Every time I trespass onto new terrain, I learn a thing or two and usually burn a thing or two, including my fingers.
Like many of the boundaries that were pushed in guitarland, we have Eddie Van Halen to thank when it comes to the joys of tinkering. Not only did Eddie teach us that brands don’t matter, he also taught us that the wizardry behind the pickguard is just some wires and solder, not really so mysterious after all. It’s the sum of the parts that count, rather than the parts themselves (which are always replaceable). With that in mind, here are 20 tinkering tidbits I’ve learned so far:
1) Buy a good soldering iron with a holder. It’s analogous to playing guitar through a good cable.
2) Buy a good solder-remover gun. Be very careful where you leave it when plugged in. They don’t come with holders (at least mine didn’t), and the entire thing heats up, not just the tip. I managed to destroy my soldering iron holder with my solder remover iron, which is a Spinal Tap moment if there ever was one. How I managed not to burn the house down remains a mystery.
3) Use 60/40 resin core solder.
4) Use heat sinks. I have yet to use them, and I’ve destroyed more pots than I can count. I need to follow my own advice one of these days.
5) Sand the top of the volume pot casing if you’re using it to ground your other wires. Otherwise the solder won’t stick and you’ll burn out the pot.
6) Heat shrink tubing is your friend (or your prom dress if you’re Lady Gaga).
7) When buying a humbucker, make sure it has four leads, not two, so you can always tap the pickup and turn it into a single coil or alter its phase with the flick of a $2.00 switch.
8) Practice on cheap parts. You can get 4-lead humbuckers on eBay from Hong Kong for $20 and fully wired pickguards for under $50.
9) Start by installing a killswitch. This is the easiest mod to do, and it will give you some confidence. If you screw this up, you may be Slingblade (although he was apparently quite good with small engines).
10) DO NOT buy electrical wire from Radio Shack. It’s not meant for wiring guitars. Get hookup wire from Guitarfetish.com. They’re a great resource for mod-happy folks like myself. I tried to make Radio Shack wire work and it’s just a pain. Forget it. But DO BUY your switches from them.
11) ALWAYS ALWAYS check in with the folks on the proboards at Guitarnuts.com. Here, you will find an answer to every electronics question, no matter how lame (I’ve already asked most of the lame ones), and they’re remarkably patient with Slingblades. And check out the videos at Stewmac.com. They’re geared more towards luthiers than tinkerers, but it’s nice to see the craft in action.
12) Always look at the tone block if you buy a guitar with a whammy bar. If the block is thin alloy, the bridge is garbage. Replace it immediately with a steel one. You can get a good one for under $50 on eBay or the aforementioned websites.
13) Don’t necessarily assume that ceramic-bar powered pickups are bad. Most of these are hotter than vintage pickups. They’re not pretty, but they work just the same and sound pretty good, too. Leo Fender would be proud to install them because they’re cheap and good!
14) Check the routing cavity of the guitar. If it’s a “swimming pool” it’s a cheap body. If it’s routed to the pickup shapes, it’s a decent body. Don’t assume because it’s a Fender or G&L that the body is a good one. I have a G&L with a swimming pool body and a Jay Turser that’s meticulously routed. In fact, all the Jay Turser’s I’ve seen have wonderfully routed bodies, an anomaly in the land of cheap-os.
15) Get a fret file and a fret rocker thingy at Stewmac.com. You’ll spend $80, but you’ll save hundreds in fret dressing fees when you get fret wear or buzzing.
16) Never use minipots. They’re a soldering nightmare.
17) Replace cheap, straight-edge strat switches with good quality Fender or curved edge switches. They’re $15 and worth every penny.
18) Don’t install a Floyd Rose in a Fender Strat. Instead, get a Super-Vee which requires no extra routing and can be removed at anytime if you wish to revert to your stock set up. If you do have Floyds (I have three), replace the tone block with a brass block available at floydupgrades.com It makes a huge difference.
19) Use Big Bend’s Nut Sauce to lube your vibrato setup and nut. You may discover that you don’t need a locking vibrato system after all. I went through a locking whammy bar phase, and now I think they’re just big, circa 1980s, pains in the butt. Remember that Van Halen didn’t use a Floyd for the first two albums and he stayed in tune rather well.
20) Always refer back to Eddie’s Frankenstrat for inspiration. It’s a testament to the fact that you don’t need to know what you’re doing to know what you’re doing!
Like many of the boundaries that were pushed in guitarland, we have Eddie Van Halen to thank when it comes to the joys of tinkering. Not only did Eddie teach us that brands don’t matter, he also taught us that the wizardry behind the pickguard is just some wires and solder, not really so mysterious after all. It’s the sum of the parts that count, rather than the parts themselves (which are always replaceable). With that in mind, here are 20 tinkering tidbits I’ve learned so far:
1) Buy a good soldering iron with a holder. It’s analogous to playing guitar through a good cable.
2) Buy a good solder-remover gun. Be very careful where you leave it when plugged in. They don’t come with holders (at least mine didn’t), and the entire thing heats up, not just the tip. I managed to destroy my soldering iron holder with my solder remover iron, which is a Spinal Tap moment if there ever was one. How I managed not to burn the house down remains a mystery.
3) Use 60/40 resin core solder.
4) Use heat sinks. I have yet to use them, and I’ve destroyed more pots than I can count. I need to follow my own advice one of these days.
5) Sand the top of the volume pot casing if you’re using it to ground your other wires. Otherwise the solder won’t stick and you’ll burn out the pot.
6) Heat shrink tubing is your friend (or your prom dress if you’re Lady Gaga).
7) When buying a humbucker, make sure it has four leads, not two, so you can always tap the pickup and turn it into a single coil or alter its phase with the flick of a $2.00 switch.
8) Practice on cheap parts. You can get 4-lead humbuckers on eBay from Hong Kong for $20 and fully wired pickguards for under $50.
9) Start by installing a killswitch. This is the easiest mod to do, and it will give you some confidence. If you screw this up, you may be Slingblade (although he was apparently quite good with small engines).
10) DO NOT buy electrical wire from Radio Shack. It’s not meant for wiring guitars. Get hookup wire from Guitarfetish.com. They’re a great resource for mod-happy folks like myself. I tried to make Radio Shack wire work and it’s just a pain. Forget it. But DO BUY your switches from them.
11) ALWAYS ALWAYS check in with the folks on the proboards at Guitarnuts.com. Here, you will find an answer to every electronics question, no matter how lame (I’ve already asked most of the lame ones), and they’re remarkably patient with Slingblades. And check out the videos at Stewmac.com. They’re geared more towards luthiers than tinkerers, but it’s nice to see the craft in action.
12) Always look at the tone block if you buy a guitar with a whammy bar. If the block is thin alloy, the bridge is garbage. Replace it immediately with a steel one. You can get a good one for under $50 on eBay or the aforementioned websites.
13) Don’t necessarily assume that ceramic-bar powered pickups are bad. Most of these are hotter than vintage pickups. They’re not pretty, but they work just the same and sound pretty good, too. Leo Fender would be proud to install them because they’re cheap and good!
14) Check the routing cavity of the guitar. If it’s a “swimming pool” it’s a cheap body. If it’s routed to the pickup shapes, it’s a decent body. Don’t assume because it’s a Fender or G&L that the body is a good one. I have a G&L with a swimming pool body and a Jay Turser that’s meticulously routed. In fact, all the Jay Turser’s I’ve seen have wonderfully routed bodies, an anomaly in the land of cheap-os.
15) Get a fret file and a fret rocker thingy at Stewmac.com. You’ll spend $80, but you’ll save hundreds in fret dressing fees when you get fret wear or buzzing.
16) Never use minipots. They’re a soldering nightmare.
17) Replace cheap, straight-edge strat switches with good quality Fender or curved edge switches. They’re $15 and worth every penny.
18) Don’t install a Floyd Rose in a Fender Strat. Instead, get a Super-Vee which requires no extra routing and can be removed at anytime if you wish to revert to your stock set up. If you do have Floyds (I have three), replace the tone block with a brass block available at floydupgrades.com It makes a huge difference.
19) Use Big Bend’s Nut Sauce to lube your vibrato setup and nut. You may discover that you don’t need a locking vibrato system after all. I went through a locking whammy bar phase, and now I think they’re just big, circa 1980s, pains in the butt. Remember that Van Halen didn’t use a Floyd for the first two albums and he stayed in tune rather well.
20) Always refer back to Eddie’s Frankenstrat for inspiration. It’s a testament to the fact that you don’t need to know what you’re doing to know what you’re doing!
Answer: He relied on Adolph Rickenbacher, and his "tinkering" in 1932. Look it up. 
