Custom Treble Bleed Circuit & Harness upgrade

 the knobs on my guitar have annoyed me for a long time, i just never felt like they gave me a decent sweep or the sound got too muddy to use.

i finally decided to pull the trigger & upgrade all the internals all at once, since id have to pull the entire harness to do any 1 thing anyway.

the plan was to do:

1. jack upgrade to Puretone gold.

2. harness upgrade to braided jacket.

3. pot upgrade to new a500k pots (& relocate the position to have both vol pots up top oriented to match the pup positions).

4. new .033 orange drop tone caps.

5. custom treble bleed circuit on vol pots.

6. add copper tape faraday cage for both pups.

alot of my materials/items arrived staggered timewise, & i just couldnt wait to do the jack, so i ended up doing that first. since i couldnt find a gold mono jack, i used a stereo jack wired for mono.

i eventually replaced the masking tape with a bit of bobbin tape.

from what i read, it was recommended to remove the harness from the f hole, but i ended up doing it through the pup hole since i was planning to remove that anyway.

i used floss to keep the old pots labeled, then later to pull the new ones into place.

the generic chinese version of the overpriced stewmac jack removal tool proved to be absolutely indispensable. it also came in handy later to maneuver the pot nearest the jack back into its home, by just tipping it vertical from its side to allow easy pulling with the floss.

the original selector case held a shared ground for ALL THE WIRES. the bridge & neck pups as well as the jack wire jacket all tied together to the ground pin. theres contradictory confusing info on the internet about this & google ai was totally fucking me up because it kept referencing Gibson or SeymourDuncan wiring which apparently uses a dedicated bus ground with non jacketed pushback hot leads. Ibanez uses integrated copper jacket grounds. the new wire i bought used the same style so i copied the grounding & verified every case was ground to itself, eachother, the bridge, the tailpiece, the strings, & the jack.

ill also mention here that i found a metal tab embeded in a support beam inside the body directly adjacent to the selector switch hole. i could not find any mention of this anywhere online. it was bent like it had either been sandwiched by the swith or pressed against it. it didnt test to have any continuity with any other part of the guitar. i read about some guitars being sprayed on the inner faces with conductive paint & google ai guessed that the tab could be meant to ground the paint to the switch, but if there was actually paint, i inagine the tab would be pointless if the switch is making contact with the inner face when installed anyway. just out of superstition, i oriented the small tab to be pressed against the side of the swith when installed to give it ground contact...just in case.

turns out the original tone caps already were .033, doh! also, they were nice neat 100v versions, as opposed to the 400v monsters i was forced to buy because orange drops werent available in 100v.

before i bought the braided jacket wire, i hadnt looked close enough to realize that my factory wiring was copper braided under the plastic jacket, this new wire had tinned braided jacket with no protective insulation jacket, so i had to taco fold it all into bobbin tape. 

i wanted to redo the lengths & routing anyway, to get rid of excess & meet the new custom pot positions.

i originally ordered the wrong tone caps by accident (.00033 instead of .033) but it turns out they came in handy for my treble circuit. in order to get a unique .00066 value, i doubled up on the .00033 caps in parallel on each tone pot. 

i experimented with a 300k resistor in parallel but found that putting the 300k in series in FRONT of the parallel caps on the hot lug of the vol pot gave me a way smoother sweep.

i also fucked up buying full size pots instead of minipots (i hadnt realized my factory pots were mini because i didnt remove them until it was time to start). they turned out to be barely passable size wise so i just used them. at least the 9.5mm height & 3/8" width was correct for the holes.

my crude wiring diagram, first draft but its correct, just meant for personal use but sharing for posterity.

these are the knob positions i switched. i had also been using a dumb reverse phase magnet setup for a while, which i just reversed to stock again. for the record, it goes slugs facing eachother, north/positive toward the slugs.

for the faraday cage (to avoid having those nickel covers on the pups, i used 1 layer .5" bobbin tape, 1 layer of conductive adhesive copper tape over that, & BEFORE THE COPPER TAPE CAN TOUCH ITSELF TO CREATE A LOOP, interrupt that copper wrap with the start of the 2nd bobbin tape wrap, which then covers the entire layer of copper after adding a little tag of extra copper to wrap down over the edge to ground to the pup baseplate.

i actually had to buy a new multimeter because apparently the 2 multimeters i already own were garbage & only measured resistances up to 2k, even though 1 of them cost over $200 new. the new multimeter i got was $15 & had manual settings for up to 200mk! technology can be awesome sometimes.

i tested my pup resistances when isolated, then used that data to verify my pot wiring, then my selector switch signal on the lugs then through the jack using a cable plugged in with clips on the sleeve & tip.

at middle position i read 5.5k, neck position gave me 8.1k, & bridge position gave me 17.3k. basically a success.

overall, it was sort of a nightmare working without an access panel. its an incredibly fucking stupid design, but i just didnt have the energy to do an access panel mod right now, even though the possible procedures were whirling around my head the entire time. 

i quit while i was ahead & put some new strings on & fixed my intonation to wrap it all up. im pretty happy with the sweep result, & the relatively intact quieter signal that results at low volumes.

next i have to make a custom tusq nut for my bass guitar, then do some rewiring on the ratnest in that one.

Guyker Bridge through body strung bass mod install; gsr200 ibanez

 the only high mass bridge with saddle walls i could find with a solid rear wall was the guyker. unfortunately, its full of design flaws. since there was no option but to make it work, i had to just fix all the flaws.

1. the saddles arent through threaded, so the screws cant pass through for increasing string length. theres only approx 7mm of intonation adjustment (without the screw falling out) because of this. the saddle height & lateral adjustment are the reason they couldnt thread through.

2. the screws are way too long, the saddles at the front of the bridge are as far back as they can go. but for some reason they will adjust forward right off of the bridge. theres no way any strings besides extra light gauges will be intonated correctly like that. im using 50/70/85/105, & the 105 requires the saddle to be just 24mm from the rear wall.

 3. the reps that sold me the guyker bridge didnt know what the thread size of the hardware was, & were cunty about it, telling me to just buy it & figure it out myself. which i fucking had to do because theres no alternative & those cunts know that. FOR THE RECORD, THE SCREWS ARE M3x0.5 THREADS. the screw lengths i ended up using were 20mm for E, & 25mm for A, D, & G. the set screws for height & lateral adjustment are also the same thread.

4. the included mounting screws are punier than the factory ibanez screws, but since they are flat heads, i had to use them on the x4 rear screws, but i used the coarser threaded/thicker round head ibanez screws for the x2 front screws.

5. guyker boasts about their lateral saddle adjustment, but its basically pointless because the saddles themselves are slightly wide set, compared to the stock saddles. with the E & A adjusted to the right & D & G adjusted to the left, the strings BARELY BARELY BARELY make it onto the fretboard. the only adjustment you could make to this would take the strings over the edge.

6. they used non conductive paint, or enamel or something. this would ruin the ground for anyone not aware of string grounding. leaving it factory from guyker would inevitably allow 60hz hum to run rampant. after careful contemplation, i found that the best way to ground the strings would be possible through another modification that was necessary. since im doing through body stringing, i had to deburr the factory holes for through body entrances, which exposed a bit of the steel & since the strings pass through there, its a great spot for full constant contact for ground. the witness points on the saddles had approx .6kohms resistance with the intonation screws, so it was less reliable than bare steel, & i definitely wanted to avoid sanding or modding the witness points. after exposing the underside of the bridge to contact the pot ground wire, i found the intonation screw did have near zero resistance to the exposed spot, but the string entrance for through body was still more reliable.

7. i found the bottom lip of the saddle was too near the string entrance on the E when correctly intonated, so i had to actually grind away material there to avoid stress on the string at that point.

8. so not as much a flaw, but it wouldve been amazing to not have to change holes, but this is how i did it. i recorded the original bridge position with masking tape, marking the string position & saddle positions. after adjusting for the rear wall thickness & moving as far away as i could without compromising the end of the instrument, i marked where the new holes would need to be. i thought if i was lucky i could skip plugging holes  but x4 of the new holes were too near the originals, so i just plugged all the old holes with toothpick splinters & titebond wood glue, left to cure 24hrs.

NOW, i was finally able to get to the actual install.

i used an 1/8" drill bit for the string holes. i used a 1/64" drill bit to pilot the new mounting holes. on the back i used a 5/16" spade bit to pilot the ferrule holes, then widened that with a 3/8" drill bit (wiggled around to ease ferrule install, since 3/8" was still super tight). i sealed the exposed fresh wood in the holes with india ink & a q-tip. i used a clamp to press in the ferrules because using a hammer on a musical instrument is for mongoloids. since i didnt use a drill press because i dont have access to one  i free handed it & there was slight drift as the bit reach the back of the bass on the E, but its so minor it had absolutely no consequence besides an aesthetic irritant.

i found that the precut hole in the bridge for strings was 1/8" but the widest point on the 105 string was actually .126" (1/8 is .125) so i had to very slightly widen that hole & the hole in the wood to accomodate the E.

my first bass ever in high school had silk winding on the strings, & the strings that i bought afterward had silk winding. i found that lately, its nearly impossible to find strings with silk winding. i guess companies have convinced consumers that they dont need it. i ended up buying ernies because theyve always been reliable on my guitar, but i added 3:1 ratio 3/16" heat shrink tubing to the tuner ends of the strings. you cant insert the heatshrink into the tuners so i made sure to leave a thumbnail length of bare string to go into the tuner hole. this is both to protect my tuner posts, as well as securely anchoring the strings in place & killing any possibility of headstock buzz.

using a long scale (37.25") to taper string set just BARELY made it past the nut by less than 1/2"!

i was able to perfectly intonate all the strings & set my height for string/neck gap & my neck was bent back into perfect alignment after adding full tension back onto it.

it was a huge pain in the ass but im super happy with the result. 

the only things left to do on this bass is replace the shitty old pots the prior owner burned when they were soldering with new a500k pots & the shitty rat nest cable harness with nice shielded wire, then replace the nut with a custom cut Tusq nut.