thearabianmage
June 30th, 2008, 12:43 PM
Hey everyone, I have a few questions about this project I'm doing. . .
I bought an old Chinese strat copy and since one of the screws that holds the spring claw threaded its hole in the body while I was removing it, I've decided to go hardtail.
First off: does anyone have any tips/suggestions/advice about this type of conversion?
Next, while I was making sure that the bridge was in the right position, two problems cropped up:
1) there is a slight over-hang in the wood on the top of the body that covers about 2/16'' of the trem-block cavity and the screws on the back of the hardtail need to go through these little overhangs. Problem? There's no wood to hold the screws once they are in place. The solution I've come up with is to screw the screws in at a very slight angle and - where there are holes for the optional string-thru-bridge config (I've chosen to do the strings-thru-rear of the bridge) I will screw some screws down into a block I'm using to fill the trem-cavity, so in effect there will be 8-9 screws holding down the bridge as opposed to 5. But I'm a noob and this may not be the best way so if anyone has any tips/suggestions/advice - feel free.
2) the next problem is that as I was fiddling around on the web, as always, I came across a site where a luthier posted a response to a similar question:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070414122743AACW1mN
The problem is that the measurements don't seem to match up. I would almost be screwing the bridge on top of the bridge pickup. And the thing is, my approximations match up with the original bridge's postion as it came from the factory. . . So, according to this luthier and his methods, all the guitars that company made had terrible intonation due to poorly placed bridges. . .surely a guitar manufacturer can't make a mistake like that can they? Point is: I don't know which measurements to trust - the original placement or this luthier's placement. . .Again, any tips/suggestions/advice?
Thanks everybody!
Joe
I bought an old Chinese strat copy and since one of the screws that holds the spring claw threaded its hole in the body while I was removing it, I've decided to go hardtail.
First off: does anyone have any tips/suggestions/advice about this type of conversion?
Next, while I was making sure that the bridge was in the right position, two problems cropped up:
1) there is a slight over-hang in the wood on the top of the body that covers about 2/16'' of the trem-block cavity and the screws on the back of the hardtail need to go through these little overhangs. Problem? There's no wood to hold the screws once they are in place. The solution I've come up with is to screw the screws in at a very slight angle and - where there are holes for the optional string-thru-bridge config (I've chosen to do the strings-thru-rear of the bridge) I will screw some screws down into a block I'm using to fill the trem-cavity, so in effect there will be 8-9 screws holding down the bridge as opposed to 5. But I'm a noob and this may not be the best way so if anyone has any tips/suggestions/advice - feel free.
2) the next problem is that as I was fiddling around on the web, as always, I came across a site where a luthier posted a response to a similar question:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070414122743AACW1mN
The problem is that the measurements don't seem to match up. I would almost be screwing the bridge on top of the bridge pickup. And the thing is, my approximations match up with the original bridge's postion as it came from the factory. . . So, according to this luthier and his methods, all the guitars that company made had terrible intonation due to poorly placed bridges. . .surely a guitar manufacturer can't make a mistake like that can they? Point is: I don't know which measurements to trust - the original placement or this luthier's placement. . .Again, any tips/suggestions/advice?
Thanks everybody!
Joe