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61' silvertone thinline re-build.

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by johnnyb » Thu Sep 29, 2011 8:20 pm

i have posted this guitar here before but ... although it basically looks the same, it is a whole new beast. it was a huge pain in the ass but worth the effort. heres what she got.

1. a complete neck job. i took the non contoured fretboard and put a 9.5" radius on it and also made it flat as a board whilst i had the frets out. this neck has no truss rod, but it does not need one. the fretboard is a fat piece of rosewood, over 1/4" thick, and under tension this thing does not budge. i kept all the nicks and wear. but the back of the neck has been smoothed out and polished.
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2. new medium/large frets. leveled, crowned and buffed. edges nice and smooth.

3. a hand made bone nut.
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4. a hand made bone/rosewood bridge. i glued a bone blank on top of a rosewood blank before i carved it.
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5. wax potted the microphonic pickups. this is what was mostly keeping it from being a gigging guitar. it would squeal like crazy at jam volumes.

DO NOT OPEN THESE PICKUPS. unless they are broken. they will wax pot fine as is. i made that mistake, ooops. there is no tolerance in these and the wires pull right off the coils and they are stuck deep in paper. the negative lead and casing ground are wired together and i had to seperate them due to the foul up. but it was a blessing in disguise ill explain later.

6. i took out the stock wiring harness and put in new pots and wires. for some reason cheaper guitars in the 60's were made with 50k pots in them. some are even 30k, 40k or even 60k. ????? these old single coils really come out when you put in a 250k pot. seriously, its like night and day. if your going to play them just do it. also an orange drop cap helps a lot. the configuration now is a master volume and master tone. 2 of the knobs dont do anything except look cool/old.

the pickup screwup caused me to have 3 wires coming out of it. +,- coil and a ground. this allowed me to put a push pull pot on the bridge pickup so i can put it in and out of phase. if it only had the 2 wires it makes a ground loop when its out of phase and is very noisy. now it works perfectly.


here it is on the bench covered in my finger prints, it does clean up really well. and now it plays great. it was dead before but now its totally alive.
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johnnyb
 
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Joined: Tue Apr 01, 2008 8:25 am
Location: Albany N.Y.

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