V-locity build

vernschrock

Junior Member
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140
This is going to be long, I apologize in advance.

I was going to wait until the parts showed up. Since I'm posting more than I thought I would, I figured I should maybe put this out there. So maybe I look like I belong here, and not just somebody spouting a bunch of nonsense. I certainly wouldn't want to be the guy that, say; bought a screamin' deal neck, 5 or 10 years ago, did a wee bit of work on it, not enough to screw it up, took a pic or two with a tuner on it, tossed the neck into a corner and never put it on a guitar, spent the remainder of my time talking junk and "giving advice", etc, etc...

This is my first Warmoth, but not exactly my first rodeo. I've built a few guitars and necks from scratch, by hand. I was quite a bit younger then with much better eyesight, while working in cabinet shops and building one-of-a-kind handmade furniture at the time. I think my skills are still pretty decent at 54. I've worked on every single factory guitar I've ever owned. I can't say I have ever liked every facet of any guitar from nose to tail. It usually involved picking one that sucked the least, and the things I didn't care for could easily be "fixed". Not only that, but I got tired of buying guitars where the actual materials and workmanship of the guitar itself was worse than the cardboard box it came in! It's also difficult finding an electric with a decent nut width. I really hate narrow necks, jumbo frets, and when the outer strings are so close to the edge of the fretboard there’s always the risk of yanking the high E right off of it!!! That's how I showed up at the Warmoth website.


So, with that out of the way. Let's begin.

I ordered back in March. A Vortex unfinished neck, and a Velocity finished body (both custom). I'm thinking they should show up in June or July. I wish it were sooner, of course.

Not that anybody will likely care, but these are a few reasons for my choices:
-I actually like the look of the Warmoth headstock better, because of the staggered tuners. But the Vortex headstock has more meat on the end, and I use a clip-on tuner. It always helps to have more space to clip on to. I like to think of it as being practical!!!
-I chose the woods based partly on the "characteristics" displayed in Aaron's videos. I realize this is a contentious subject that usually devolves into arguments culminating in roughly one group saying, "This is what I hear, so go f@(% yourself!", and the other group saying something along the lines of, "Not only do I not hear any differences, neither do YOU!". So let's just say my choices were driven only by the PRETTY COLORS, and leave it at that. If you fall into the second group, you're going to love the part where I talk about how I plan to wire up the two switches with a single P90!!!
-Why rosewood shaft with a kingwood fretboard??? Easy, kingwood is in the true rosewood family. It’s gorgeous and feels great. Name one other place that would even give me this option, without paying for a $10,000 custom handmade guitar.
-I went with the Velocity body, because it kinda looks like an LP and a Tele had a baby, and the Ty Tabor Signature from Guilford Guitars is the uncle. I think I read somewhere that it's sort of based on the EVH stuff, but I really don't see it. Maybe I'm wrong about the EVH part.
-Single P90 in the bridge position. I like the sound of neck pickups for certain things, but I always end up bashing into them with my pick. So rather than doing something silly like improving my technique, I plan to get different "pickup tones" with my switching. I'm not much of a tone knob twiddler, so I wanted the benefits of twiddling while getting repeatable tone values every single time.
-The switching will consist of one of two options:
One volume pot, which is a given.
Option 1 - 3-way Blade Switch wired to give different flavors to the pickup. Basically used as a single pole switch. Each position is followed by a cap (of a particular value) mated to a resistor (particular value). This works like a tone pot set at a certain position with a knob that can't be moved. The second hole will have an on/off treble bleed switch.
Option 2 - In order to go even further out there! A single pole 8(or 10)-position Rotary switch, essentially doing the same cap/resistor combo as described above. Just more tones. If I go this route, the treble bleed switch will move to where the blade switch is (a carved piece of kingwood will be used as a cover for the blade switch holes). It will either be really cool, or really stupid!!!
--I rigged up a homemade test bench that will be used to determine the desirable cap/resistor values using alligator-clip test leads, etc. I already know that all of this works. I used one of my other guitars as a test mule.--

The specs:

Vortex Neck

Tiltback Gibson® Scale Conversion
Indian Rosewood Shaft
Kingwood Fretboard
1-3/4" (44mm) Nut Width
59 Roundback Profile
10" - 16" Compound Radius
22 Fret
SS6105 Frets
Schaller Locking Tuners (Black)
White Pearloid Trapezoid Inlay
GraphTech Black TUSQ XL Nut
Standard 4-Bolt
Unfinished


Velocity Guitar Body

Chambered Construction
Roasted Swamp Ash Core
Quilt Maple Lam Top
Rear Rout Control Cavity
P90 Bridge Pickup
Schaller 475 Bridge (Black)
Strat Pocket Shape
Forearm and Tummy Cut Contours
Amber Dye Top Color
Transparent Amber (Burst-over) Back Color
Gloss Finish

QiJack
Stringjoy Strings (Custom Set)


Here are the Visualizer screenshots:


 
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Updating to include the pickup choices I talked about in this thread;
Kinman Questions/Concerns | Unofficial Warmoth Forum

I will be choosing one pickup to go in this build out of these four options. The first two are noiseless (what some people like to call "humbuckers", and not really P90's). All of them are Bridge versions, of course. With black covers, to go with the rest of the black parts.
- Seymour Duncan P90 Stack
- Righteous Sound Ninja 90
- Lollar Standard P90
- Wolfetone MeanerP90
 
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Here are the P90's I have so far. Duncan Stack, Lollar Standard, and Wolfetone Meaner. The Righteous Ninja will probably be here in July if the lead times are correct.

In the pics, the order from left to right is; Wolfetone, Lollar, Duncan.

The Wolfetone certainly looks the most handmade as far as packaging goes. As in, there literally wasn't any. Bubble wrapped, that's it. The Lollar is in a cool little box, with the pickup sandwiched between layers of foam. Duncan is typical Duncan.
53726267816_1d7a00b1c4_z.jpg


All three are nondescript. Plain black covers. The eagle-eyed will notice that the Lollar is F-Spaced, the other two are regular spacing.
53726485373_72973c8d71_w.jpg


I tested in ohms and wrote the number on the back of each. Whether it has any real discernible correlation with anything is beyond me. I just thought I'd include it if anyone is interested.
53726614834_56e0f0413e_w.jpg
 
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The fret ends will probably need a bit of smoothing. I tightened the truss rod, neck is perfectly straight. The nut width is a smidge over 44mm, which is fantastic as far as I’m concerned!!!
53818610878_0acf1728f8_w.jpg

53817442702_ac2babc118_w.jpg
 
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Looks beautiful! Good luck on the build! ..........................................Uh, I just noticed no neck pickup, grab a chisel.
 
Looks beautiful! Good luck on the build! ..........................................Uh, I just noticed no neck pickup, grab a chisel.
Thank you, Spud.

I figured if I change my mind about a neck pickup; I’ll do some handheld Dremelling at a super slow speed to make sure it grabs and tears the wood grain, and then clean that up with a dull somewhat straight screwdriver!!! 👍 😆
 
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A “brief” update: 🫣

I’ve done a few things out of order. I wanted to get started on the electrical testing, so I know what the final layout is going to be.

After burnishing the Rosewood parts of the neck, I attached it to the body. And it burnished up nicely! I went up to 2000 grit. Smooth, slippery, just a beautiful surface as you can see here:
53829559909_78148f5ed5.jpg


It went on without a hitch, everything was perfect. The heel/neck pocket, pilot holes, everything. Just sweet. I double and triple checked everything, but I wouldn’t have had to. Mounted the bridge, just as painless as the neck.

Strung it up, and checked the frets. Unfortunately, here is where I found a real flaw. High fret on the high side of the 9th fret. It didn't take much to fix it. During this whole thing, the strings went on and off several times. This is my first foray with locking tuners. Here’s one downside I found to locking tuners; after tightening them down, tuning up, loosening a few times, half of the strings broke right at the spot where they get locked down. Maybe I tightened them down too much??? How tight is "tight enough"?

Anyway, after fixing the high fret and checking the frets again, I started playing a few things. Now keep in mind, I’m more of a slider than a bender.
BUMP…..BUMP…..BUMP
BUMP…BUMP BUMP…

That brings me to my first big mistake. Somehow I got it stuck in my head that 6105’s are the closest sized frets to ones I like. I was wrong! Boy was I wrong. These things feel like those obnoxious old school speed bumps that you have to slow down to 5 mph to keep from tearing up your car!!! Ugghhh!

If that wasn’t enough, the fretboard didn’t exactly do me any favors either. Mistake #2.
In my own defense, let me say that the grain structure of the small piece of Kingwood I have is nothing like the grain of the fretboard. The grain on my piece I have is similar to Rosewood. Not exact, but close. Not quite as open as Rosewood, but it still burnishes to a smooth luster. The Kingwood fretboard isn’t like that at all! Really tight, closed grain. Smooth, but tons of friction. I burnished a few fret spaces to see what happens. Nope, that made it worse. Now it felt like a fretboard with a thick gloss finish. I could barely move my fingertips at all. So after a bit of experimenting, I settled on using a wire brush attachment on the dremel at a slow speed (on purpose this time!!! 😛) in a cross-hatch pattern to rough up the fretboard to reduce some of the friction without having it look like absolute crap.

I did that before tackling the frets. I basically ended up doing a complete fret job. I took the thickness/height way down, and crowned them to resemble 6130’s. Right now, they’re in between 6105’s and 6130’s as far as height goes. So much better. I think I can live with this.

If I had to do it again, I’d go with the same Rosewood shaft, 59 Roundback, 44mm nut width, etc. I absolutely love those parts of the neck. But I would use 6130 frets and either a Rosewood or Wenge fretboard.

The body has been great so far. I haven't noticed anything about it that bothers me. (y)
 
Last night I got around to starting the electrical testing.

I began with the pickups, which seemed the most logical. I thought that I'd be splitting hairs between the various P90's, but I was wrong about that too.

To keep everything even, I used a volume pot that measures exactly 500k. The pickup testing didn't take long at all. There's not much difference between the SD and the Wolfetone, but the Lollar is miles ahead of both!!! The SD and Wolfy sound positively anemic compared to the Lollar. It's not that the Lollar sounds hotter, but fuller, "more complete" if that makes any sense. I have around ten 500k pots with realistic measurements between 433-539k. I'm not a big fan of fizzy trebles, so the Lollar mated to a Bourns pot measuring 493k is just plain sweet as all get out and the best compromise for pot values!!! And no, the Righteous pickup hasn't even arrived yet. Depending on how long it takes to show up, and how much I fall in love with the Lollar in the meantime, Righteous may end up disqualifying themselves before they get a chance to compete.

This is how the guitar is looking right now:
53829468193_15aa86af54_w.jpg
 
nice

I’m not trying to be critical but between “bump,bump” and getting fretboard friction, are you potentially fretting to hard?

I know I did when I started playing again after a left hand injury that sidelined my playing for a decade. I retrained myself by not using my thumb. That helped tremendously as it showed that I wasn’t fretting to hard with my fingers, but instead with the counter pressure of the thumb. Ergonomics and all LOL.

I still deal with it on heavy strung acoustics at times.
 
nice

I’m not trying to be critical but between “bump,bump” and getting fretboard friction, are you potentially fretting to hard?

I know I did when I started playing again after a left hand injury that sidelined my playing for a decade. I retrained myself by not using my thumb. That helped tremendously as it showed that I wasn’t fretting to hard with my fingers, but instead with the counter pressure of the thumb. Ergonomics and all LOL.

I still deal with it on heavy strung acoustics at times.
I get what you’re saying. I wish it would be something like that, but if I switch off between the guitars I have within arms reach, why would I only be fretting too hard on this particular guitar?

Anyway, thanks for trying to come up with a possible solution. 👍

Or maybe you’re saying this guitar is so superior to the other ones I have, that it takes the most delicate of touch to fret??? 😛
 
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Looking great! Sorry about the frets. All I can tell you is for me, anything smaller than 6150's on an electric are too small. I can slide up and down all day on 6100's, 6115"s.6150's. You might try a fretless?
 
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