Thinking DIY

Testing box So, after having the piezo pickup the number of pickups grew to 3, and wiring them for testing which combinations I do like is not too easy if everything's mounted inside the guitar, I decided to build a wiring testing box for testing different wirings to find the one I like the most. All the electronics mounted inside a shoe-box, with speaker wire sockets on the side (4 sockets are just enough for 3 pickup live wires plus one ground, coming out from the guitar), plus the jack on the side. It's ugly, but and probably a bit noisier than the final installation should be, but it works for testing. I just realized that the 4 wires won't be enough for two coil split humbuckers plus the piezo pickup, but will think about that later. Guitar top sanded down for refinishing In the meantime, the parts still being on their way, I decided that I'm not ok with the finishing of the top, so I still have time to re-finish it. So I sanded off everything from the ...

Looking around for good piezo pickups, there are only a handful of options (most suggestions say that for blending with the magnetic pickups a preamp for the piezo is recommended, which I can agree with, based on my testing) * L&R Baggs piezo tune-o-matic ( T-Bridge ) with Control-X preamp * Graphtech Ghost piezo tune-o-matic with Acoustiphonic preamp * Schaller piezo tune-o-matic with a Bartolini preamp These might be good, but they cost a bit too much, any of these costs just as much as the full guitar did up until now, so they are way too pricey, as I didn't want to double the cost for an experiment like this. Looking around on ebay I found another item from a couple of UK sellers, usually priced around 40$, so ordered it, and it just arrived today (after having some fun with GDPR+ebay shipping: Royal Mail sent it from UK via a carrier called GLS, but due to privacy concerns Royal Mail doesn't hand over the phone number I specified, only the address, so the carr...

So, now that the guitar is finished and assembled, looks fine, but does it work? Well.. no. Why? * low E string ring fell off and made string unusable at first set-up - bought a cheapo nickel-plated light 9-42 set from Dunlop for the initial setup * 21th fret a bit higher than it should be, the rest is perfectly fine - might fix it later, but it's really not that relevant given it's towards the end of the fretboard, and not causing any fretbuzz or problems * tune-o-matic bridge weak, set-up screws held in place by a wire, but they can move up/down, and so can the individual saddles - will anyway replace it with a piezo saddle* one out of the six tuning pegs does not work as it should, it blocks each ~5-6 turns, you have to force it to move past that point, then it does it with a large click (probably a problem with the gear), so re-stringing is a pain due to initial tune-in requiring lots of tuning peg turns - have to replace the full set, so I am going with black LP-style...