Tonedef
Well, I had a busy Sunday afternoon. ?
What started off as a fret dress for my noodlecaster, turned into a full-blown rebuild. ?
Dressing the frets was a lot of work. Apart from the annoyance of taping up the board, the frets wers INCREDIBLY uneven. The biggest problem was not so much that some frets were too high... it's that some frets were too LOW. This of course means that all the others ones need the dressing more than those one or two low bastards. >☹
While I was removing the neck, I also discovered that the machine heads were loose and rattle-y, that got sorted with the reassembly. Also, the neck had been shimmed with a thin sliver of wood. This turned out to be completely unnecessary once I reassembled the neck, the dipshits at the sweatshop had added the shimming to hack the uneven higher fretboard into some semblance of playability.
The dressed and polished fretboard looks like a million bucks! It has made the guitar look and feel a lot more expensive than it is. So in a moment of impulsive ad-hackery, I decided to give the body a work-over as well.
I cleaned out some stray gobs of polyurethane from the cavities, and then lined the inner surface with tinfoil (I had painted some super contact onto all the surfaces first). This was a simple as carefully squishing a large sheet of tinfoil into the cavities (well, it's Aluminium foil, but I'm not gonna type that f&*#er out every time) , and using a paintbrush to smooth it into the corners. I then lifted it out, glued the cavities and push it back in. A couple of tears here and there are inivitable but it worked out great in the end.
To shield the face, I simply glued (with clear bostik) a sheet of foil to the underside of the scratchplate (I had shaped the foil beforehand to be slightly smaller than the edges of the plate) and smoothed it out with a small round dowel of wood (like flattening pastry). I then cut out the pickup holes with a razor blade.
I also decided to wax and shield the nasty pickups on it. This was a simple as pushing tine foil into the white 'cups' of the pickup covers, then cutting away the foil from the holes so that there was no contact with the little metal rods when I pushed the pickup back into the "cup". Waxing the pixkups was a simple matter of untaping them, melting crafter's wax into the coil with a small hobby-sized heatgun I've got, and taping them back up once that had hardened.
To ensure that everything got grounded properly, I made sure that the foil on the pickups spilled over beyond the screw-holes on the sides, then folded it back over the screwhole. This then gets grounded with the spring which pushes against the lining on the scratchplate. Clever, ne?
To make sure the cavity foil grounded properly, this was as simple as making sure the cavity foil spilled over onto the face of the body, so when you screw the plate down, there is contact between the body foil and the scratchplate foil. The plate foil was grounded as normal through the bodies of the knobs. At all stages I used a continuity tester to make sure I wasn't making stuff-ups.
Screwed everything together properly, put on a nice set of fresh Ernie Balls, adjusted the truss rodd, and she was ready for a bit of a tune and a try-out.
WHOOOOHA. Oh boy, what a difference!!!
Ooh, I forgot! I also increased the tension on the trem block springs by screwing the two retaining screws in further. This made a huge positive difference in the overall tone of the guitar. It was sort of muddy and warm and woofly before, now it's got a wonderful, sharp, tenorous and powerful timbre to it, even just playing acoustically. I should have done that long ago, it was like all of ten seconds' work.
Well, it's like a brand new guitar! The action had been set ridiculously high in order to make up for the uneven frets, now it's lower than coral snake turds, and I still haven tweaked it to it's full potential yet. The even frets look beautiful, they play beautifully, I can now pull gorgeous clean and bright notes high on the fretboard - and the pickups have lost most of their microphonics, and no more irritating buzzing and humming! The amount of force I have to put into to fret cleanly is a fraction of what it was.
I am a happy man. I justed wanted to play and play and play, but to my shock'n horrar I discovered I had only finished up at around 2:30 this morning, so it was time for shower and bed.
Tired, but happy!
I can only imagine the pleasure of playing a brand-new, perfectly set-up, top-shelf axe. That's gonna be my x-mas pressy to myself!
Tonedef
I'm telling you, when I get home this afternoon I'm gonna crash for a couple of hours, then it's me and the strat and the ghost of Stevie Ray!
It was a wonderful learning experience. Not so much for the technical bits (first time I ever dressed frets and whatnot), but for the grokking in fullness of what experienced peeps gaan aan about when it comes to setup and playability.
StephenG
as a stroke of pure coincidence, I happened to be in Builders Warehouse Saturday morning and happened to see (and buy) a roll of the aluminium foil tape.. I think it was R72 for a 50m roll..
so I too spent the weekend shielding both my strats.. although I suspect it may be a bit easier with the foil tape than trying to contact glue normal tinfoil.. you just cut, remove the backing paper and plats vas... then I used a scalpel to trim all the edges and slots...
also used the opportunity to remove the existing earth wires and replaced them with shielded wiring...
boy what a difference to not have humming or buzzing of earthing ticks.... almost complete silence now when the guitars are plugged in and u not touching any metal parts.
i really don't know why they don't already come like this.... I'd say its a standard "mod" that every strat should under go.
Tonedef
BUGGER! I messed up, guys! Whereas I had buzzing while fretting before, thats gone but now i get buzzes when 'hammering on' (thanks for the headsup on that name, Rob).
I reckon I left the fret crowns too flat so Ill need to retape and all that shit again >☹. Any other possible diagnosis?
Gearhead
It depends on whether the buzzing is on the fret because you are not able to press down on the string since it is too flat, or whther the buzzing is over the front of the fret like you say. Maybe your hammer technique is not right? (no offense). The fret top radius should be sorta same as the width maximum.
