Now I've gone and done it.

It's finished. Woohoo!


MoonBassAlpha has been created and now it has got to stand up to being used. I have taken the opportunity to take some some higher resolution images before it gets scratched and bashed!




The ash (light wood either side of the neck) has really come to life now that the oil / wax finish has been applied. The grain figuring is quite pleasing. The controls in the upper cutaway are for the fboard LEDs, whilst the lower cutaway has two volume knobs and a pickup selector switch. The switch is a special 4 pole on-on-on variety that allows the coils in each pickup to be connected in series, parallel or use only a single coil. This gives a good range of tonal flexibility.






The side you see when you're playing it...






...and the side you see when you're lying on the floor.



The walnut stripe sandwiched between the ash front and back offers a nice contrasting warm colour.






The back looks nice too. The red of the padauk is quite striking, and the grain of the wenge shows up with what looks like alternating black / milk chocolate stripes. The back of the neck looks a little bulky, but there are a lot of wires that are routed around the trussrod and into the upper horn at that point.

Although difficult to see all of them here, the copper plates used as control covers were polished for me by Ace. Good work, but then you should see his car...






This one reminds me that at an early stage I dismissed the constraints imposed by a stand. I wanted the guitar to look how I wanted it to look when it was being played, rather than make it terribly sensible when it is resting. The downside is that although it is perched on the stand for the photos, it really needs its own stand built. If I sneeze it will probably fall off.






The front of the headstock has a hole in it...










...and so does the back. I am glad that the trussrod adjustment is done at the body end - it leaves the headstock less cluttered.





I had to take a few shots without the flash so that the fboard animation could be seen. Here's a few, but the pacman in particular doesn't come out too well on longer exposure times as it is moving! It does show the idea though.



Sound wise the guitar has a good solid bottom end, helped by the dense woods and slightly thicker-than-normal neck profile. The pickup switch and volumes allow several tone combinations. I really like the single pickup coil sound which comes through very clean. The humbucking switch positions give more depth to the sound with the series position having a really fat sound.

I am really pleased with the bass, but there are a couple of things I didn't get quite right.

1. Sharp internal angles are very difficult to sand and oil/wax, so they look a little rough in places.

2. Stoning the fboard is a skill that I don't think I have mastered yet. The fboard is reasonable, but still slightly wavy, causing some fret buzz in places. The string action is around 2.5-3.0mm so it can't be that bad.

3. The circuitry that drives the LEDs can be heard! It is only faint, and with the rest of the band doing their job it would never be heard, but for recording purposes it is best to leave the animation off. I reckon it looks the biz, so I'm still happy to put up with it.

Next up is to rebuild my bass amp - the power amp is fine, but the signal stages are showing signs of wear. I think that it was too complicated last time, so its time to rethink what is needed in the way of signal crunching controls. At least this shouldn't cause any splinters.


Don't worry - there are other mad people out there building weird things in their garages.

Nearly Finished

The Battery Holder

I must admit that the battery holder is a bit of an afterthought. Now I have nowhere else left to put the batteries other than in the end, just above the throughneck. Still, I want to make it user friendly so I want a battery holder that requires no tools to open and allows changes to be quick and easy.



I toyed with the idea of springy clips but in the end I have gone for a disc with a flat cut into it. Access to the batteries is by rotating the disc (shown in the left hand side picture) so that the flat allows them to pass in and out of their slot. Turning the disc to virtually any other position stops them from falling out (right hand side picture). It is not particularly elegant but it is functional and allows me to leave the tools at home.

Pickup Lines

To mount the pickups (after I had removed all the wood from their fixing points) I cut some small plates from the same piece of copper bar that was used for the nut. The pickup holes had recesses cut into them with a chisel and holes were made to fasten the plates to the wood. The mounting holes for the pickups were threaded with an M3 tap so that M3x30mm mushroom headed bolts could be used.


Doing it this way I can remove the pickups and plates to give access to the volume pot if it ever needs attention. I just need to remember to put the pot in before the pickup when it is finally assembled.

The pickup plates in place. They have two fixings at the top and just the one at the bottom which allows room for the cable to escape into the volume control cavity.

What a good fit! - no doubt helped by the camera angle.

I fitted the pickups and put the strings on to check the clearance between them. I noticed that the bridge pickup was further away from the strings than the neck pickup (due to the neck angle) so I had to pack the pickup plates out by 2mm to get a more consistent gap.

I had a play on the bass (acoustically) and all seemed well, but the frets were still inclined to buzz and their lower edge was quite scratchy on my left hand. After 'playtime' all the hardware was removed in preparation for finishing.

Before I got onto the proper finishing job, I decided this was a good opportunity to restone the frets. Last time I was probably a bit too tentative, so this time I ground off a bit more until my trusty 12" steel ruler verified that all was flat. The frets were sanded and wire-wooled to get back to a civilised profile and the bottom edges carefully filed smooth.

Finishing

Moon Bass Alpha was already pretty well shaped so it was just a case of removing knocks and grubby fingermarks as well as ensuring that the padauk was all the same shade of red as it seems to dull down after a while. I went through the different grades of sandpaper (80, 150, 180, 320) which took 3 long hours.

Not that exciting, but a necessary hurdle to make it look as professional as possible. I don't want to get it out of the gig-bag only for a layman to instantly comment that it looks homemade. I am hoping they will fooled into thinking it is a rare custom beast...

Once the sanding was finished and the dust removed, I rubbed in a coat of Danish Oil. The picture shows the difference this makes as it really brings out the full character of the wood. The PVC look on the fboard is just to prevent the oil soaking into the wrong places.

The oil is allowed to dry overnight before it is rubbed down with 0000 grade wirewool. This is like wiping clouds over the surface - 0000 grade wirewool is sooooooo fine! The oil / wirewool was done three times over the course of a week and after the last wirewool session a layer of beeswax / carnauba wax was applied and buffed to a pleasant sheen. Nice.

Making Square Holes

To make the pickup holes the same size a template was created using MDF. The pickups are Bartolini M34 Soapbars - a matched bridge / neck pair. They measure 89mm by 39mm, with a radiussed corner. Ideally this needs to be replicated on the template.

The template was made on the small milling machine at work, using the XY table to give a shape with decent right angles. It was then fastened onto the guitar with double sided tape and the router fitted with a straight 'follower' bit to follow the outline without destroying the template.







Masking tape was used to mark the positions of the pickups. As the position affects the sound it seemed a good idea to place them as far apart as possible. Practical reasons prevent this distance from becoming too great. The bridge pickup could be mounted straight alongside the bridge, but the string movement at this point is quite small resulting in a weedy output. The front pickup could butt upto the end of the fboard, but my occasional ventures into slapping & popping use that area to get under the D & G strings. I would keep bashing my fingers on a pickup if it was sited there, so again it has to be moved back by a couple of inches to give me finger room.



The template was restuck to the other position and the second pickup hole was routed. It finished up a shade too tight to get the pickups in and had to be whittled with sandpaper and hand chisels to give a good fit.






A small oversight has caused the bridge pickup hole to enter both the rear control cavities. Apart from having to move the batteries elsewhere, the main problem is that the pickup fixing screws will have nothing to fasten to. Not that I could find woodscrews that long and thin anyway...



Before the pickups were routed, the guitar was strung to check that the truss rod worked, check the balance, but mostly because I just wanted to play it albeit acoustically. Fortunately the rod worked fine after a three-quarter turn to give just the right amount of neck relief, but I couldn't get the action down as low as I would like. I just ran out of bridge adjustment.



There is some neck angle (angle between the neck and body) but this was something that I found difficult to accurately calculate beforehand (I didn't know how thick the fboard was going to end up after all the shaping). The only thing for it at this stage was to recess the body by around 3mm so that when the bridge is fully wound down the strings will be practically bottomed out on the frets.






It is a scary proposition to get the router back out all over the front of MoonBassAlpha especially near the fboard and all those nice curves stand a chance of getting gouged by a power tool gone crazy, but it needed to be done. Spacer blocks were taped to the top of the body as the router needs a flat surface to work from.




3mm was removed from the wenge / padauk and part of the ash. It was then blended back to keep the general shape. The top curve was able to be extended into the body more as it joins the top of the fboard. On the whole it looks remarkably similar to how it was beforehand (which is good) but now I will have the adjustment needed to set it up properly later on.



I just need to work out how to fix the bridge pickup without preventing one of the volume pots from being fitted or changed...

Shapely

The neck can be shaped now. More woodwork - more sawdust. It is amazing how many different places the stuff gets into!



The neck was roughly shaped with a round surform at each end before the spokeshave was introduced to it. I don't get chance to wield my spokeshave often so this was quite an opportunity. It was a job to be taken gently as gouging out a big lump of wood at this point would be rather annoying, so I removed small strips at a time in between smoothing the shape with coarse sandpaper. It has ended up with a 'D' shaped profile, with a larger radius in the middle, tightening towards the edges. The shape was blended into the headstock and onto the body at the other end until it seemed to belong together.









Once the neck was shaped & sanded to a smooth finish it was turned round and the frets were for a good sorting. After a scratch or two on the fboard I decided to put masking tape over the surface so that further work would not wreck any further. The frets were levelled with an oil stone block. It needed a fair bit of levelling as the fboard was a bit thin and wobbly once it was glued on to the rest of the neck.

I looked at getting some fret files, but they seemed stupidly pricey. I used needle files, sandpaper and finished off with wire wool. It doesn't look to bad, though I think in hindsight that the rough side of the oilstone was a bit too extreme.

The zero fret was bashed in just like the others. I had hoped that with the main frets being filed down, that the zero fret would be sufficiently proud (0.5mm ish) to do its job.

Oh. It was about the same as the rest. I thought the levelling had taken a lot more off, but I suppose to make a zero fret work properly it has to be taller fretwire. I pulled the fret out whilst pondering and then took the easy way out and sawed through the fboard at the zero fret position in preparation for a more conventional nut.

The next pic shows the newly cropped fboard and a sawn piece of copper bar that will become the nut. Why copper? I had some 6mm bar ready to hand.

The copper bar was used to mark a line on the headstock so that a groove could be made for it. I rumaged around and found a thin chisel (1/8") which was ideal. The bar was a good tight fit in the slot and then it was shaped to become nuch more 'nutly'. I carefully marked the centre point of the strings with a saw, but did not size them fully at this stage.

It looks a bit chunky and should be a good substitute for a zero fret. I don't like the idea of the nut being made out of a soft plastic as it may absorb some of the string vibration. It finishes off the the top of the fboard nicely - especially as there is no truss rod cover.






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The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Now the fboard is on I really wanted to know an answer to one of the "you-won't-know-until-you-get-there" questions. During the initial sketching phase I was trying to achieve a blend of visual balance along with a mechanical balance.

The visual balance has had one or two detours along the way but I am still quite happy with the its appearance. The mechanical balance has always been something that would be hideously lengthy to try and calculate to any degree of accuracy and just isn't worth the effort.

So now the bass is in one piece I thought it would be well worth slapping some of the major components on and try it out. First up was the strap buttons. I must admit I was not foreseeing any difficulties here, but the way the top horn curves downwards required a short drill to avoid the neck being in the way. The Dremel just about squeezed in!

The Hipshot Type A bridge was marked out as accurately as possible on a guitar with no straight edges or a centreline and fitted with the supplied self-tapping screws. It looks good, though part of me wanted to fit a thick brass plate on the back and use bolts to clamp the bridge on more firmly. Maybe one day...



As can be seen above, the volume controls and pick-up switch have also been fitted temporarily. These are not wired up yet, mostly because the pick-ups are still in a box.

The Schaller M4 series tuners were fitted onto the headstock. On the original sketch the tuners were angled in sympathy with the headstock outline. In practice the tuners have a worm drive that can be above or below the main tuner shaft.

If I swap the tuners over from left to right, there is sufficient room to angle them and get my fingers in without bashing my knuckles on the wood. The downside is that the tuners operate backwards which will seriously do my head in over the passage of time.

The tuners were put back to normal and straightened up. This comes under the heading of bad as I am sure with more planning this could have been resolved, but it is just going to have to stay that way now.



The control cavity plates were recessed into the back of the bass. This is the ugly part. The cutting of a curved outline with a straight chisel across different woods was always going to be a bit fraught, but the end result is quite scruffy.

I would like to present a whole range of excuses, such as "it was too hot" but it was largely impatience. I wanted to get this relatively dull part finished so I could move on to something more interesting. Fortunately it is on the back and the careful photography hides most of the undulating gaps. The brass covers were fixed with any available screws, but will eventually will be finished off with a shine and fitted properly.

The two AA batteries just about squeeze into the top control cavity, between the switches. The animation circuitry and LEDs are still working.



Once all these jobs were done, a strap was fitted and the bass was tried out in a stringless fashion. The overall balance was quite good - not particularly nose heavy, but fitting a large brass nut could change that to some extent. It seemed quite happy sitting at the usual 30degrees.

The tuners, bridge and strap buttons will have to be removed again before the neck is shaped to prevent them from getting damaged. Fitting them again will be much easier as the holes will be already in place. I've still got to try and cram the pickups onto the front of the body without fouling any of the switches & pots hidden underneath. There's only one way to find out...

Bodywork

Before the top section of the body is joined to the neck the remainder of the control cut-out was marked out (on the neck) and then removed with a drill and chisels. Before the two parts were mated together a paper tube was wrapped around the wires that go between the control cutouts so that the wires don't get covered in glue. One day I may need to carry out some repairs so I need the wires to be changeable.



After the cutout was done, it was time to get back to the glue and clamps. Fortunately I had already dowelled the join so there was little chance of the parts drifting out of alignment, but a good dose of pressure helps keep the joint gap under control. The neck side of things was straight and flat, but the mating face on the body had a slight curve across its width (due to my lop-sided sanding). As it was pretty good along its length I decided to leave it alone instead of risking a compound curve.

Getting all the wires through from the neck LEDs was a tight squeeze, but hopefully that means it won't rattle later on...



Once the top part was fastened on, the same process was applied to the lower part. This was a lot easier as there is no wiring going on down there at the moment. The control cavity was finished off and I made sure that I can get the pickup switch in.

The brass cover plate was fitted over the PCB once all the LED wires were plugged in and a temporary battery holder tucked in. The animation part still works!



Clamping and gluing the lower part. The fboard is still protected by tape in case I have a further attack of clumsiness.



After both bosy sections were glued into place the surfaces were blended together. The front and back had to be planed with a small jack plane and finished off with sandpaper. The upper and lower horns fade into the fboard using a round surform and more sandpaper. Finally the bottom of the guitar (ie below the bridge when it is standing upright) has had its curve finished off.



It is good to be able to pick the guitar up normally now and sit it on my lap. I need to think about a stand. I have a couple of stands for my other guitars, but these have fairly conventional shapes. MoonBassAlpha will need an angled stand...

Fretting

The fboard has now been levelled along its length and cambered across its width. The fretwire I am using is straight. This needs to be radiused a bit tighter than the fboard camber so that the frets will sit properly when they are hammered in. Bending the fretwire by hand will probably result in very uneven twisted frets so another gadget needs to be thrown together.



The fret bender is a board with three ball bearing races on it. The fretwire is drawn back and forth whilst applying pressure to the third bearing mounted on a bracket. It did the job OK and all three lengths were ready for fitting.

Before the frets were slapped in, I had to get the width of the neck wood to match the width of the fboard. It was originally left oversize so that the placement of the fboard on the neck wasn't too critical, but now that is fixed the excess material can be removed. I used a small 7" jack plane to remove most of the Padauk and finished off with coarse sandpaper. The back of the neck will be shaped later, but it is good to start getting the neck close to its finished size.

The newly uncovered wood is quite brightly coloured and shows how some of the previously exposed Padauk has aged over the last few months. The picture also shows that the small fret marker dots have almost disappeared, but the ghost and pacman are reasonably visible.



A practice fret was bashed in an offcut of the neck wood and seemed to go in without breaking or splitting the wood.

The first fret went in at the body end. I don't tend to play much at that end of the guitar so if the first few are a bit lumpy it won't be too serious. The technique outlined in Melvyn Hiscocks book was used - ie cut oversized, tap the ends in first, followed by the middle, and this seemed to work fine.

After a few frets it became apparent that the camber on the fboard was not as uniform as it should be. The edges had a little too much taken off, giving a change of radius. This resulted in the frets sitting down nicely over the central three-quarters, but the very ends were slightly proud. More tapping, bashing, thumping, & drifting did not make this any better and re shaping the frets to include a change of radius sounds difficult, time consuming and will probably result in an instrument that feels wrong, so they were left alone.

After all the frets were fitted, the ends were trimmed with a Dremel with a small grinding wheel. Some of the fboard gap filler (PVA/paint) was used to fill the visible ends of the fret slots top and bottom. The slightly proud frets were treated to some superglue to ensure they remain in their position and do not relax or fall out at a later stage.

The zero fret was not fitted at this stage as the frets still need to be levelled or dressed. This needs to be slightly higher than the others so it needs to be hammered in after the levelling has been done.

Iron Maiden Rocks!

What a good gig!

Chewie & me booked a couple of tickets about 6 months ago to go and see Eddies mates. As luck would have it, Mayfield & Bruce were going too, so we managed to hitch a lift to Twickenham with them. Their tickets were for seats, ours were standing in the madding crowd. At the time I would have given almost anything for a seat, but you get a better view down in the thick of it.

The support acts did alright, but didn't seem to connect that well. The IM boys (ok, not boys, they must be well into their 50's) did a great job belting out all the 80's classics including Aces High, The Trooper, Revelations, Hallowed Be Thy Name, Powerslave and even the lengthy Rime Of The Ancient Mariner to name but a few. Oh, and not forgetting the song about £6.66 of phone credit!!!

With the IM gig fresh in my mind, I was soon back to working on Moon Bass Alpha. This doesn't really count as useful, but I had to give it a go:

I was talking to Pete (who regularly beats me at badminton) about the origins of Moon Bass Alpha from the old sci-fi series Space 1999 (another funky bass-line to use one day). It's lucky I wasn't thinking of the Muppet Show at the time or I could be developing a Gonzo Bass.

OK, back to the plot. Everything was now glued inside the neck and the various LEDs were tested. The alignment betwen LEDs and fboard was also checked so it was all ready for the next big step of sticking the fboard on. This is one of those times that requires a drum roll.

It's a bit final, and if it doesn't work once stuck together it will be a bad day indeed. The good news was that the fboard was placed in the correct position and the LEDs all worked afterwards.

The bad news was that the fboard didn't seat down evenly along the length of the neck. There was definite high and low spots with over a millimetre between them, and quite a few gaps along the edge. This was a bit unexpected as I had used several clamps and a block to spread the load. With the benefit of hindsight I think that the fboard itself is a bit too thin, and that sanding the radius onto the top is best left until after it has been glued on. Next time...

The following photo is carefully staged to avoid showing those bits (but I know they are there).

I decided to put the tinted perspex 'windows' over all the LEDs before I start filling and sanding. All the perspex shapes had been cut earlier and all need to be sanded flat once glued in. A small amount of clear superglue did the trick for all eight pieces. These lenses were rough sanded back down to about the same level as the ebony.

A mixture of PVA wood glue and water based blackboard paint was used to fill the gaps along the edge of the fboard and around the perspex lenses. This has a tendency to sink back in places, so these had two or three layers built up. This was then given a final sanding down the grades using a 1m rule as a straight edge and eventually finishing off with 1200 grit paper.

Looks like the fboard is ready for the 'f' s.

Cut It Out!

Before the neck and body get joined together I need to make some space for the circuit board, switches, voulme pots and batteries. I started by drawing out the shape of the covers on paper making sure they will fit in the little space there is left. The covers were then fashioned out of brass plate and could then be used as templates to mark the wood. The first one to try was the space for the PCB, and it is going to have to live in the upper horn. This is as far away from the pickups as I can reasonably manage to keep any interference noise to a minimum.







The controls for the animation are also in the top part of the guitar and are going to be inside the top cutout. This leaves the guitar with fairly clean lines and the minimum of clutter (unlike my Vigier!). There is a toggle switch (Bright/Off/Dim) and a push button (Animated/Static) which are usefully placed to my mind.



On the lower half of the guitar the pickup wires will eventually be routed to a pair of volume controls and the mother of all switches. This toggle switch took a while to track down and is a 4-pole, 3-position, on-on-on switch. In short, I can wire the switch so that I can have the coils from each pickup in series, parallel or just a single coil. This gives some variation in the tone, whilst keeping the controls simple. I don't want it to become too complicated...





Once the switching and volumes have been taken care of, the signal is routed to a 1/4" jack socket. I am using a Neutrik socket as they are really well put together. The hole for this was bored using a hand brace and bit. The recess for the mounting flange was chiselled out and the fixing holes drilled, as well as a connecting hole between the back of the socket and the volume / switch area.




The neck is still being built up. The carbon rods have been stuck in with epoxy resin. I didn't think that wood glue was going to do much with carbon! After them, the LEDs fitted onto veroboard were tacked into place with a dot of superglue and the fboard tentatively placed on to check the alignment. A amount of adjustment was required and then this was bonded into place with wood glue, contact adhesive and superglue (mostly due to me hedging my bets on what is going to work best!). This needs to be thoroughly set before I verify the LEDs are working and then it will be ready for the fboard to be stuck on.

Trust Rod Fitting

Now is the time to fit the truss rod (or trust rod, which I feel is more apt, as I am really hoping it is going to work!). The aluminium anchor piece needs to sit under the fboard near the headstock. A hole was chiselled out for it carefully. I have to remember that the neck will be shaped later, and that getting carried away with chiselling could result in a weak end, which is the sort of thing to be avoided at all costs.

The anchor piece slots in OK.

The same sort of thing was done for the adjustment end. This one had to be done even more carefully as it will be visible after the fboard is stuck on. A couple of 30mm screws hold in the nylon bearing block. This had to be penned black as it too will be just about visible. The trust rod was covered with some 6mm heatshrink sleeving and a little oil before it was commited into the chamber of doom, er, the truss rod channel.

Everything was checked & double checked and then it was time to fit the wooden fillet that has a curve that matches that of the (chamber of doom) channel. Lots of glue and clamps as per usual.

Put to one side and allow to dry - and here's one I made earlier. Aaah a Blue Peter dream sequence!

When the glue had dried, I cautiously wound up the tension, looking for a bit of backwards curving. Disaster! As I wound the tension up, the neck started to show a small amount of forwards bow, ie in the same way that would be caused by a set of strings.

Smeg!

Due to the amount of tension I put on the neck, the anchor piece had also started to migrate south for the winter. Whilst I puzzled over what seemed to be a loophole in the laws of physics, I thought I had better strengthen the anchor piece to neck connection with some additional blocks of wenge. This meant losing a small amount of the channel intended for the carbon stiffening rods, but this was more essential. Some M5 washers were also 'drifted' into place just to help out.

Well, here's my theory. Ahem.

The neck currently is not shaped, it has a rectangular cross section. Because of the amount of channels cut into the top, the absence of the fboard and the extra thickness and girth of the neck it is not only much stiffer than a standard neck, but the stiffness is predominantly underneath the trust rod. When the rod is tensioned, although the curved channel should cause a backbow, at the present time with the greatly increased rigidity of the material under the rod, the top of the neck is more likely to be compressed causing a forwards bow.

This seems to make sense, but I cannot do much about proving it until the neck is a lot closer to being finished (ie back coarsely shaped, fboard stuck on). This is another reason why we all have to Trust In Rod.

Go Naked

Looking at the size of the veroboard layout for the MoonBassAlpha animation circuitry and then looking at all the cutouts that I have made in the body, I soon realised that there was nowhere for the electronics to live. A PCB needed to be knocked up to keep the size as small as was practical. The board was designed using CADStar, which is too powerful for its own good and will let you to make quite fundamental errors if you wish. I finished the board off with my customary "its close enough for jazz" air of carefulness...

I was tipped off about a local PCB manufacturing company Spirit Circuits who offer a cracking free PCB service! I am sure it is for legitimate prototype work where they hope to get repeat business rather than homers, but I'll just have to placate them over the coming months. The idea is that they supply a one-off board with the copper tracks and drilled holes, but without any silkscreen legends or solder resist mask. This is why they call it "Go Naked".




The finished board looks a bit lost in their A4 paper sized panel. Once it is cut out then construction can begin. The smaller parts are placed first and it soon becomes apparent that fine surface mount parts on a board with a ground plane really does need solder resist. It is quite tricky to avoid shorting things out with only a 10thou gap.



After the small stuff, the meter was brought out to verify that there were no short circuits and then the larger parts were slapped on. I mananged to incorporate a few cock-ups into the board design (no surprise there) which required one or two upside-down components and a couple of after-thoughts tacked on in precarious places.

The board was ready to try out and I needed to see how noisy it was going to be. Very few guitars have animated fboards, and probably even fewer have switch-mode power converters to power them. The lights take around 100mA from a 5V supply and running this from a 9V battery would make it a rather short-lived affair. Much higher capacity can be found from AA rechargeable batteries, so the MAX856 converter takes this 2.4V and changes it to either 5V or 3.3V (which gives a neat choice of brightness levels).




After a few more modifications, the board is not putting out too much noise. It needs to be kept away from the pick-ups as far as possible, (distance helps) and 3V3 operation is much quieter than 5V. All-in-all the amount of buzzing and whistling that makes it to the pick-ups is pretty small, and won't be noticed when everyone's playing. For recording use, I could just turn the lights off...


The Trust Rod Ends

At last the rod ends have been finished. Many Thanks to Keith at Eaton for knocking the brass adjuster up in his, er, lunchhour. This really looks good and will be seen somewhere at the end of the fboard once I channel out a place for it to fit into. It is going to run in a nylon block. This should spread some of the compressive force back into the wood and turn more smoothly than just a manky old washer alone.

The thread gets a bit tight in the middle - possibly it was tapped from both sides and didn't meet exactly, so I need to drill part of the thread out from the large end. It will still have a good 12mm of thread remaining.

The adjuster is based on the ones used in the Ernie Ball MusicMan range of basses. This seemed a much more elegant way of adjusting the rod instead of trying to find a hex-key down a tunnel like most guitars. I couldn't find one off-the-shelf at the time though I am sure somebody makes them somewhere.



The other end of the rod has got to be anchored into place (somewhere under the first fret or thereabouts) with this interesting shaped piece of aluminium fashioned by me using the milling machine at work. Hmm - functional, but it is probably just as well it won't be on display.



I hope all this fits...