Dazkeirle
Junior Member
- Messages
- 192
Any fellow Brits here will know that last night's weather was very 2020 (as in weird, uncomfortable and unexpected).
With a temp of high 30's and close to 100% humidity it felt like Atlanta here, not the UK. While ATL has air con, and buildings designed to stay cool, here our buildings are designed to stay warm. Needless to say it was impossible to relax, sleep, do anything useful without sweat pouring out of my eyes.
As you may have gathered from the whole grain picking that went on, I can be a tad obsessive and like things just right. Alignment of my pickups is something that has been giving me nightmares. In the past all the screws have already been there for me, I've never had the responsibility of getting that straight, and that posed a few issues to me in how to do that.
You see two trains of thought here, get them straight to the guitar or straight to the strings. I thought long and hard and as I may change pups, straight to guitar is probably the cleanest (and works with my OCD).
So how do you get them perfectly straight to the pup routs when the ring obscures them? Centre lines? Could do, but I thought of another way while I was planning to mask the body (to avoid scratching).
You see as the tape I have is fixed width, if I laid it straight along the edges of the routes I could then measure the edges of the rings to the edges of the tape, mark my screw holes and then confirm the measurements of the holes with the schematics I have for the rings to confirm. That's what I did and yep, it totally worked.
As for drilling the holes. I did the common sense approach of measuring the screw core and finding a drill bit that size and practicing on a scrap piece of wood to make sure the thread wood bite. For my screws I used a 2.34mm drill bit (that's I'd bought for the tuner location pins).
Used tape on the bit etc. etc.
Now, don't go taking the mickey, but my dremel's slowest speed is too fast for this, and my hand drill is a bit big so I opted to take it slow, and old school with a hand drill. Never really used this before despite owning for years but my feedback is that I should use a handdrill more often, far easier to keep straight and in control and ended up making some very very neat screw holes.
And how does it all look?
May seem trivial to most, but this step (and doing the tuning heads) straight gave me more anxiety than anything else. I think I must be on the spectrum.
Finally, it appears being diligent with tolerances pay off (even getting the pups nice and straight within the rings) as the strings are perfectly straight on the poles too. Success!
With a temp of high 30's and close to 100% humidity it felt like Atlanta here, not the UK. While ATL has air con, and buildings designed to stay cool, here our buildings are designed to stay warm. Needless to say it was impossible to relax, sleep, do anything useful without sweat pouring out of my eyes.
As you may have gathered from the whole grain picking that went on, I can be a tad obsessive and like things just right. Alignment of my pickups is something that has been giving me nightmares. In the past all the screws have already been there for me, I've never had the responsibility of getting that straight, and that posed a few issues to me in how to do that.
You see two trains of thought here, get them straight to the guitar or straight to the strings. I thought long and hard and as I may change pups, straight to guitar is probably the cleanest (and works with my OCD).
So how do you get them perfectly straight to the pup routs when the ring obscures them? Centre lines? Could do, but I thought of another way while I was planning to mask the body (to avoid scratching).
You see as the tape I have is fixed width, if I laid it straight along the edges of the routes I could then measure the edges of the rings to the edges of the tape, mark my screw holes and then confirm the measurements of the holes with the schematics I have for the rings to confirm. That's what I did and yep, it totally worked.
As for drilling the holes. I did the common sense approach of measuring the screw core and finding a drill bit that size and practicing on a scrap piece of wood to make sure the thread wood bite. For my screws I used a 2.34mm drill bit (that's I'd bought for the tuner location pins).
Used tape on the bit etc. etc.
Now, don't go taking the mickey, but my dremel's slowest speed is too fast for this, and my hand drill is a bit big so I opted to take it slow, and old school with a hand drill. Never really used this before despite owning for years but my feedback is that I should use a handdrill more often, far easier to keep straight and in control and ended up making some very very neat screw holes.
And how does it all look?
May seem trivial to most, but this step (and doing the tuning heads) straight gave me more anxiety than anything else. I think I must be on the spectrum.
Finally, it appears being diligent with tolerances pay off (even getting the pups nice and straight within the rings) as the strings are perfectly straight on the poles too. Success!
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