A Jazzmaster inspired by the ULTRA Series

[Verne Bunsen]

Good advice, and duly noted!

 

[Cagey]

Yeah, they surprised the hell out of me. When the first one broke, I was like WTF? I'd never had such a thing happen before. Forewarned, I still broke a second one, and I'm not one prone to muscle that sort of thing. I mean, I've only installed about eleventy bajillion pots over the last 50 years or so. In retrospect, I realized that probably most, if not all of them had larger brass bushings.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Yeah, they surprised the hell out of me. When the first one broke, I was like WTF? I'd never had such a thing happen before. Forewarned, I still broke a second one, and I'm not one prone to muscle that sort of thing. I mean, I've only installed about eleventy bajillion pots over the last 50 years or so. In retrospect, I realized that probably most, if not all of them had larger brass bushings.

I have not had that particular pleasure, and Imma try to keep it that way. Knowing me it would be after I had everything wired up and ready to go, I'd decide I just needed to snug this one up just a hair.....
:doh:

 

[Verne Bunsen]

For any inquiring minds that want to know, this is what you get with an S1 knob:

The knob has a shoulder that rests on top of the pot shaft. The set screw engages a profile on the shaft, so you don't have the ability to adjust its vertical position like you usually can a set-screw knob. I initially installed the pot with a friction washer under the pickguard, but found the knob dragged on the pickguard. I removed the washer and the pot came up far enough that the knob now sits just right.

The plastic bushing goes on the splined shaft of the button, and then engages another shaft inside the switch.

Pretty sleek. Dare I say... elegant?

The fine knurl of the knob is not my preference, but options are pretty limited. I have a drawer full of chrome flat-top Tele knobs, but mine are all the more coarse knurl that I prefer. It would bug me to have knobs so mis-matched, so until I can track down a coarse knurled S1 knob I'll be looking for an appropriately fine knurled regular knob to match.

This wiring is a beast, and I'm in no hurry since the body won't be in for a few weeks, so I've just been working on it here and there. It's a lot of wires and the Jazzmaster route is pretty close quarters, so things will need to be kept very tidy under there.

 

[bagman67]

Hey, VB, I'll look in my Drawer of Misfit Parts and see if I've got an odd fine-knurled flat-top Tele knob lying around.  Will follow up in this thread later tonight or tomorrow.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Hey, VB, I'll look in my Drawer of Misfit Parts and see if I've got an odd fine-knurled flat-top Tele knob lying around.  Will follow up in this thread later tonight or tomorrow.

That would be great! I’ll trade you for a coarse one!

 

[Logrinn]

That looks mighty fine! Good work with that wiring.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

That looks mighty fine! Good work with that wiring.

Thanks! I made a lot of headway on it last night. It actually went really smoothly. Over the last couple of weeks I've gone through the whole wiring multiple times in my head; I identified some issues and made some revisions to the schematic, figured out how I wanted to route all of the wires, and generally developed a pretty solid plan of attack. The only thing remaining is to solder the pickup leads, but I'm not sure I want to do that yet. I'm going to hook them up with alligator clips later today (hopefully) and give the whole assembly the old tap test. I have verified everything with the multimeter and it all appears to check out...

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Alright, wiring is complete!

(The loose ends on the upper phase switch are where the pickup leads will go, so they had not been soldered yet in these pictures)

There is room for passing a few wires through the frame of the S1 switch, but one has to take care that they are routed in such a way that they will not obstruct the moving parts.

I decided to go ahead and hook the pickups up and just left myself a good bit of lead.

The pickguard was actually starting to develop a warp from the way it sits with all the components installed. I made it a temporary home until such time as the body arrives. It keeps the pickguard nice and flat and made function testing everything a breeze.

Function checks look good! Cycled through all of the controls and switches while tapping the pickups it and all seems to do like it is supposed to. Sweet!

Now, here is hoping that it will all drop agreeably into the body when it arrives.....

 

[rgand]

Looking good! I do like that pot/switch.

 

[Rick]

:yourock:

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Looking good! I do like that pot/switch.

Thanks! I’m pretty thoroughly impressed with the S1 switch. I expected it to be a pain to wire up, but it was really quite painless. I’d go so far as to say it is easier to deal with than your standard DPDT push/pulls, and it has twice the switching power. With so many wires in so small a space, I can see where you could make a headache for yourself by getting in your own way, but with a little foresight and planning it is not so bad. The only drawback I can see at this point is that you are severely limited in regards to knob selection. I’m interested to see how it holds up, although with Fender installing them as OEM components I expect they should be good for a whole lot of cycles.

 

[rgand]

Looking good! I do like that pot/switch.

Thanks! I’m pretty thoroughly impressed with the S1 switch. I expected it to be a pain to wire up, but it was really quite painless. I’d go so far as to say it is easier to deal with than your standard DPDT push/pulls, and it has twice the switching power. With so many wires in so small a space, I can see where you could make a headache for yourself by getting in your own way, but with a little foresight and planning it is not so bad. The only drawback I can see at this point is that you are severely limited in regards to knob selection. I’m interested to see how it holds up, although with Fender installing them as OEM components I expect they should be good for a whole lot of cycles.

It sounds like a fine thing to try. Let's see, that means another build to plan after the ones I have on the drawing board now.  :icon_biggrin:

 

[rgand]

What taper is the pot on it?

 

[Cagey]

Very nice work! Neatly done, so I'm sure it'll drop right in. Famous last words, I know, but you were clearly diligent about neatness, solid connections, and mechanical support, which are areas many wiring jobs suffer from.

However, between those pickups and the lack of shielded cabling, I suspect it may be more noise-prone than I'd be able to tolerate. Although, admittedly, my tolerance for such things is ridiculously low. You could shield the cavities in the body, but I wouldn't expect too much out of that. Won't hurt anything, but won't return a great deal, either. If it was me, I'd take a good look and perhaps do a test if possible with EHX's little "Hum Debugger" magic box...

[youtube]VbdtS_SNqvY[/youtube]​

It's not a noise gate, so there's no "gating" effect to it. That is, you don't hear it turning on/off like you do with gates. I think it's basically what's called a "3rd order Butterworth filter" that's tuned to some very narrow frequencies, so the only thing it kills is 50/60hz and maybe some first or second order harmonics. So, it has very little effect on the tone of the instrument, but is highly effective at noise filtering.

They're relatively inexpensive and highly effective.  Why we don't hear more about them is a bit of a mystery to me, but maybe it's as I said earlier - it's just me and my low noise tolerance. Or, perhaps people just don't want to spend money on a widget that isn't a "special effect" and doesn't make them sound like SRV or Jeff Beck RFN. Anyway, I've heard the thing work in real life, and can't imagine going without one if I played a noisy guitar.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

What taper is the pot on it?

It’s an audio taper.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Very nice work! Neatly done, so I'm sure it'll drop right in. Famous last words, I know, but you were clearly diligent about neatness, solid connections, and mechanical support, which are areas many wiring jobs suffer from.

However, between those pickups and the lack of shielded cabling, I suspect it may be more noise-prone than I'd be able to tolerate. Although, admittedly, my tolerance for such things is ridiculously low. You could shield the cavities in the body, but I wouldn't expect too much out of that. Won't hurt anything, but won't return a great deal, either. If it was me, I'd take a good look and perhaps do a test if possible with EHX's little "Hum Debugger" magic box...

[youtube]VbdtS_SNqvY[/youtube]​

It's not a noise gate, so there's no "gating" effect to it. That is, you don't hear it turning on/off like you do with gates. I think it's basically what's called a "3rd order Butterworth filter" that's tuned to some very narrow frequencies, so the only thing it kills is 50/60hz and maybe some first or second order harmonics. So, it has very little effect on the tone of the instrument, but is highly effective at noise filtering.

They're relatively inexpensive and highly effective.  Why we don't hear more about them is a bit of a mystery to me, but maybe it's as I said earlier - it's just me and my low noise tolerance. Or, perhaps people just don't want to spend money on a widget that isn't a "special effect" and doesn't make them sound like SRV or Jeff Beck RFN. Anyway, I've heard the thing work in real life, and can't imagine going without one if I played a noisy guitar.

Thanks Cagey! I’m curious about how noisy it will be myself. My other Jazzmaster has an aluminum pickguard and is otherwise un-shielded, and it doesn’t exhibit excessive hum. I’m hoping this one will be the same... If it’s atrocious, then I will certainly give the Hum Debugger some consideration.

 

[rgand]

What taper is the pot on it?

It’s an audio taper.

Thanks.

 

[BigSteve22]

Plus 1 on the EHx "Hum Debugger". Does what it advertises, without destroying your tone. No clamping, so sustain remains. Just remember that it's not designed to attenuate noise generated by other pedals, so it will not replace a gate. It's strictly to kill EMI induced hum. It's the first pedal on my board, with a Boss NS-2 at the other end, for those times when only a gate will do.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Plus 1 on the EHx "Hum Debugger". Does what it advertises, without destroying your tone. No clamping, so sustain remains. Just remember that it's not designed to attenuate noise generated by other pedals, so it will not replace a gate. It's strictly to kill EMI induced hum. It's the first pedal on my board, with a Boss NS-2 at the other end, for those times when only a gate will do.

I keep an NS-2 around for those times as well, it is the only noise gate I ever didn’t hate. The ability to put noisy pedals in the loop and have the gate trigger off of the guitar output rather than the pedal output is huge!