Peavey Roadmaster - The Saga Continues

Had the lid off the Roadmaster again yesterday. Cleaned the hell out of everything I thought needed cleaning. Refreshed all the solder joints. Lugged it back upstairs, plugged it in and... still fizzy, crappy overdrive on the lead channel.

Bah.

BUT!

It appears there might be a solution.

Turns out the effects loop might be causing a problem, as even though I never use it, it's still gonna get dirty and corroded and because of the way these things are wired that might cause signal loss. So as soon as the house is awake and caffeinated I will begin diagnosis and, hopefully, I might be able to fix this problem without taking the damn thing apart again.

Effects Loops: a Problem Waiting to Happen on Diabolical Devices

Stratocopy

Well, it's certainly been a bit of a day here at Atomic Tangerine. Having had a terrible night's sleep I overslept enough that I missed most of the overtime I'd volunteered for, enough that it simply wasn't worth going in. Fail. So following shower, exercise and breakfast I decided to get going on that Stratcopy I'm working on for a friend.

I downloaded a generic wiring diagram from StewMac, and set to work. I won't bore you with all the details but I ended up with a pretty neat wiring job.


Yuh huh, I'm pretty happy with that.

So neck the pickups go in, the neck and middle from the Strat body I got from Mr. Foxen, and the bridge was originally the neck pickup in my old Jag-Stang, so the guitar has a 6.0k bridge pickup as opposed to 5.2k.

Aaaaanyway, I wire up the jack, ground the bridge and set to work using my trusty old Peavey Envoy 110 and a tuning fork (it's much easier to test pickups this way as it means not having to remove brand new strings if you need to do more work), and what I found was a little surprising. Position 1 on the switch was giving me the neck pickup, position two was the neck and bridge combined, and the rest of the switch positions were giving nothing but silence.

So I look at the diagram and check the switch and realise that the wiring on the diagram needs a different switch, so I get yet another diagram and set about desoldering and re-wiring.

And this time it works. Which pleases me.

Now I need to re-string it and set it up left-handed as J injured his hand a while ago and is finding it easier to play left-handed now.

ETA: Oh yeah, and none of the knobs I have will go on the CTS* shafts so I need to get new knobs.

*Yeah, the eletronics are waaay better than needs to be in this guitar, but when there's only about a fiver difference between the generic electronics and the good stuff you might as well just get the good stuff.

Project Weekend! - Swift Les Paul copy

I've almost completed rebuilding the Les Paul copy. The new electronics have been installed (after some chiseling and a lot of filing as the CTS pots are larger than the ones that came in the guitar). I've chosen to wire it in the 1950s Gibson style, mostly becaue I could, really.

The only problem is the I'm missing one of the bridge posts and the nut, so I've had to order new ones as I am seriously stumped as to where the originals have ended up.

Photos of my embarrassing soldering will be posted tomorrow.