ZR TREM with compound radius neck?
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SustainerPlayer
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You'll have to shim the saddles to get optimum performance.
croquet hoop
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I think people around here generally advise to get a 18" radius at the bridge on a guitar with a 10-16 radius on the neck. Since the ZR trem was mainly used on guitars with a 430 mm (17") radius, it is close enough that you should be able to use it un-shimmed and forget about it. I'd follow SustainerPlayer's advice it you want your setup to be as perfect as possible, but without modification the guitar will still be perfectly playable.
Jumble Jumble
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DMRACO said:
It's perfectly playable without the shims, yes. When I put the shims in out of curiosity, it was a "woah" moment. Difficult to describe because obviously the change is tiny, but it was similar to the effect of taking a guitar for a Plek setup. It went from being a good guitar to being something a bit special.
First of all thank you guys for replying. You kick ass! I was kind of discouraged that it wouldn't play right and there was nothing that I could do to modify it to get it to play right if I had to and I have heard so many great things about it like the intonation screw that allows intonation without even having to detune the strings and the thumb wheel instead of the damn screws you need a screw driver for to name a few lol And second far as the shimming goes I found a ling to a site that may benefit me, and you guys as well. Let me know what you think.
http://forum.ibanez.com/yaf_postst81149_Shimming-the-saddles-on-a-ZR--question.aspx
http://forum.ibanez.com/yaf_postst81149_Shimming-the-saddles-on-a-ZR--question.aspx
Jumble Jumble
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DMRACO said:
The standard 0.2mm Floyd Rose saddle shims available from places like AllParts. Two each on the two E strings, and one each on the A and B strings. And also, take out the wide metal shim that's included in the Floyd Rose as standard under the middle four strings.
I actually did a bunch of maths to work out the exact height required for each shim, but in the end the 0.2mm ones are the only ones available unless you want to hunt around for different thicknesses of materials and make your own shims.
The "real" Ibanez forum is a recent one, the grandaddy of all thing Ibby (& Floydish) is ibanezrules:
http://ibanezrules.com/
Parts, links, tech info as excruciating-detailed as you want to go, he's done a good job keeping it up over the years. Floyd Rose himself - there is a real person - licensed it out decades back and just watches the money pile in, so it's been left to others to get as nitpicky as U-wannabbee. As far as it being "good enough", I'd think you'll want to get it as correct as possible mathematically, then work back from there. Soda/beer cans are a bit thinner than the official shims so the most nitpicky of nitpickers get some tweener heights that way. I'm not at all Floydish myself, but it does tend to be associated with shredding, so action as low as possible is worth a shot. All the info's been in place for several years so you can get good advice - the sevenstring.org site tends towards shred too.
http://ibanezrules.com/
Parts, links, tech info as excruciating-detailed as you want to go, he's done a good job keeping it up over the years. Floyd Rose himself - there is a real person - licensed it out decades back and just watches the money pile in, so it's been left to others to get as nitpicky as U-wannabbee. As far as it being "good enough", I'd think you'll want to get it as correct as possible mathematically, then work back from there. Soda/beer cans are a bit thinner than the official shims so the most nitpicky of nitpickers get some tweener heights that way. I'm not at all Floydish myself, but it does tend to be associated with shredding, so action as low as possible is worth a shot. All the info's been in place for several years so you can get good advice - the sevenstring.org site tends towards shred too.
dmraco
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Jumble Jumble said:
It sounds like you are making the e strings higher and everything else lower. I would think it the opposite with the radius neck. Obviously I am not considering the current stock shim situation of a Floyd or it's radius if it even has one.
Thanks
Jumble Jumble
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The built-in shim takes the radius of the bridge from 12" to 10" (which matches the nut).
Take that shim out, you've got a 12" bridge. Add the five shims I describe and you've got about an 18-19" bridge.
The reason you lift the outer strings rather than dropping the middle ones is that the middle ones won't go down any further! So you raise the outer ones, then drop the entire bridge a bit to get the action back to where it was.
Here's all the math if you really care:
http://www.jumbleguitar.com/2012/04/17/bridge-logic-revisited/
Take that shim out, you've got a 12" bridge. Add the five shims I describe and you've got about an 18-19" bridge.
The reason you lift the outer strings rather than dropping the middle ones is that the middle ones won't go down any further! So you raise the outer ones, then drop the entire bridge a bit to get the action back to where it was.
Here's all the math if you really care:
http://www.jumbleguitar.com/2012/04/17/bridge-logic-revisited/
Jumble Jumble
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Yes, exactly. With a tighter radius you have no choice but to have the action on the middle strings higher than on the outer strings.
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