Completed builds.

[WRGKMC]

Hey guys. It's been a while since I checked in here. Been busy after the move from TX to VA which was a nightmare moving all the gear I had collected. Between the home furniture and the gear, it filled the largest moving truck the moving company had, and the cost was close to 10K just for the move. Everything made it OK without damage. That was mainly due to the way I packed everything. Some of it got pretty creative. I had 25 guitars and basses to ship so I took the necks off most of them and crated them up in bubble wrap.  In fact everything was pretty much bubble then shrink wrapped.  Since they charged by the number of square feet, I packed a lot of gear inside the speaker cabs too. I knew I had a lot of stuff, but you don't appreciate it till you pack and unpack it all.  

Anyway.  I have Two builds I spent quite a bit of time experimenting to find a good setup. Both have bodies made of sycamore which is exceptionally light wood. They weigh maybe 4 pounds each unloaded, and the tone is also quite different from a normal Strat and Tele which made finding a good pickup choice difficult.  I started with Vintage spec alnico 5 pickups which weren't bad but given the brightness and lack of wood density I still wasn't satisfied.  Since I already have a half dozen other strats and several other tele builds, I wasn't afraid of trying something less traditional seeing I had that covered already. 

First major change to the Tele was to try out the Keith Richards Micawber mod putting a full sized PAF in the neck position. I first tried several hotter pups, but it caused an imbalance with the single coil bridge. Richards used a hot would pedal steel pickup in his tele and I don't have any bridge pups worth rewinding to compensate. I instead switched to an Epiphone PAF which came out of my EPI Dot. I had put some 57 style PAF's with Alnico 7 magnets which have more gain than the stock DOT PAF's which have Alnico 5's. 

That wound up being an excellent choice for the neck, except for the added bass which made the blend of the two pickups a bit rough. I gave each pickup its own volume pot which helped blending but I still wasn't thrilled.  Maybe it's me getting older but I prefer a set and forget setup that requires minimal tweaking.  2 or 3 great tones using the switch and a single volume is my thing.  

After doing several recordings I realized this thing was still a basta*d for tone and playability.  At the same time trying to get the right pickup tone I was also trying out all the different possible bridge types.  I started off with a Classic Stamped steel 3 saddle bridge, went through all the adjustable types and was into my third version of 6 saddle bridges and it was still coming up short.  I needed more mass to get the kind of sustain and pinch harmonics a tele in noted for. I eventually tried the last option which was to install a PAF tele bridge with a 6 brass saddle bridge. The bridge was only $12 from China and I swapped the cheap potted metal saddles for some chrome covered brass saddles from another bridge in my cab.  

I put another EPI PAF in the bridge. I had a second set of those EPI pickups that supposedly came out of an EPI Les Paul. The bridge has a good bite to it so I suspect it might have an Alnico 7 instead of a 5.  The ohm meter test is nearly identical to the stock Dot but its slightly hotter so I can only surmise by the way it plays now.  In any case, it wound up being an excellent balance and I now have something that sounds close to a Tele Custom.  I may eventually try some wide range Fender style pickups to get a broader response but I'm in no rush.  I'll do a separate post for the Strat.  Thanks for reading.

 

 

[gardo]

Good looking Tele