"Well, we’ve warned you." It is finally time to assemble my dream Super Strat

  • Thread starter Thread starter GreatRedDragon
  • Start date Start date
Chubtone said:
It's hard to tell from your pictures, but the tuning peg posts sticking out of the Low E and A strings seems much shorter than the ones for the High E and B strings. You said that the Low E and A string ones are too short. Can we see a pic of all 6 of the tuning posts sticking out the front of the headstock? I'm wondering if you have the lowest staggered ones that are intended for the B and High E installed in the Low E and A positions?
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Just checked and yes, I absolutely had them in the wrong spot. I still don't have quite enough clearance but I imagine that's cause I'm using Hipshot's "screw-free" mounting plate. I'll screw the tuners in proper and see how that plays. Thanks!
 
GreatRedDragon said:
Just checked and yes, I absolutely had them in the wrong spot. I still don't have quite enough clearance but I imagine that's cause I'm using Hipshot's "screw-free" mounting plate. I'll screw the tuners in proper and see how that plays. Thanks!
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Excellent. I think you will be good without that mounting plate. Good luck.
 
Chubtone said:
Excellent. I think you will be good without that mounting plate. Good luck.
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You were right on the money, with the tuners screwed on everything is perfect.

And now it is fair game to claim my Monster has .001% Chubtone DNA. :LOL:
 
I'm 99% done. Unfortunately, the nut I bought back in August has fucking disappeared... and so did the nut I bought before it in May. :dunno: So new nut incoming shortly.

Other than that, assembly is complete. I've wired it up and it should all work.

The electronics layout I've chosen is as follows:

Bridge pickup: Duncan Distortion
Middle pickup: Duncan Custom Flat
Neck pickup: Duncan Custom Stack Plus
Switch: CRL 5-way
Pots: Bourns 500k, Bourns dual-gang 250k
Killswitch: Sanwa 24mm arcade button

It's wired with auto-splits in Positions 2 and 4, so four of the five positions are hum canceling - only the middle position is true single coil.

The two volume controls (both labeled "Tone") are a dedicated 500k volume for the bridge pickup, and a shared 250k volume for the neck and middle pickups. I chose this configuration because I like to flip between bridge and neck to switch from dirty to clean.

I've finished assembling the bridge. The string clamp screws each have an M4 nut to make intonation easier - the nut will hold the saddle in place when I loosen the locking screw, and let me fine tune the intonation with a socket. I've spray painted the nuts with the same Tamiya candy lime green I used on the block and claw (and on the trem stopper, which I will almost surely need). Details like this are what I've been thinking about the last few months (notice also the lettering on the knobs has been tinted green with a Copic marker).

uWGepvk.jpg
 
Ran into a few more hiccups.

The nut I bought was too low. Thankfully Graphtech does free exchanges, so I'll be swapping it for a taller one - albeit with a 9.5" radius, which I'm not really concerned about.

The bigger hiccup is the electronics. Individually the components seemed to work as I hoped, but for whatever reason when wired up I could not get sound out of the neck pickup. After checking and rechecking and rechecking again I just ripped it out and I'm going to try an alternate configuration.

Instead of using a dual-gang pot and a standard 5-way switch, I'm going to use a standard 250k pot and a 5-way super switch. I've never mucked with a super switch before and it's kind of annoying, because with a standard switch I could get the neck and middle on their own pot quite easily on the two poles... but that would chop out the auto-split. And with the super switch, I need to use two poles just to get the standard 5-position Strat wiring, and with the splits taking up an additional pole I have just one extra pole to make it all work. And even then I had to compromise a bit. And even that is assuming it will even work....

So here's what I came up with:

SKUnQJk.png


Red: Neck hot
Yellow: Middle hot
Blue: Bridge hot (output of 500K pot)
Purple: 250k pot

Poles #1 and #3 go to the input of the 250k pot. In position 2 the bridge pickup goes through it as well. The bridge pickup goes right into a 500k pot before hitting the switch. Pole #2 goes to the jack, and in positions 2-5 it gets fed the output of the 250k pot, while in position one it just gets the bridge pickup. Pole #4 splits the pickups in Positions 2 and 4 and outputs to ground.

If this doesn't work it's back to square one.

However, I was able to pluck a note out of it on Halloween as I'd hoped.... so that's the official birthday of this Monster.

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Maybe not so successful as that (if you can consider killing a hunchback and drowning a child a success, which I certainly do)....

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That's more like it.
 
Where did you find that Jake E Lee style pickguard?
 
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