Have you boiled your pickups?

Effectively, that’s what I’m doing here. These Jag pickups are taking a bath in a pot of hot wax.

When we talked about pickups a little while back, we discussed the fact that they were, for all intents and purposes, a big coil of wire and some magnets. Sometimes, the windings of that coil can move around a tiny bit (sometimes vibrating in sympathy with the note being played or just as you jump around the stage). This movement can be ‘picked up’ and added to the amplified sound which can result in nasty feedback. Pickups with this issue are often referred to as being microphonic.

Soaking in hot wax—called potting the pickup—allows the liquid wax to seep through the gaps between the windings and the other hardware (base-plates and so on). Once the wax cools, it solidifies in these gaps and helps prevent that movement. It’s important that the pickups are soaked for a while. When they warm to the same temperature as the wax, that ensures good penetration deep within the coils. You’ll notice a bubble in the photo—these continue to pop out slowly as the wax penetrates.

Wax tends to be the most common potting material as it’s easy to apply and makes it possible to disassemble the pickup in the future if the need arises. Lacquer and even epoxy have been used from time to time but neither penetrates as well as wax (they’re too thick) and they cure into impenetrable, hard, pickup-shaped lumps. Forget about disassembling one of these.

There are a couple of things worth mentioning on this subject:

Firstly, many of the most sought-after tones come from un-potted pickups. Some tones/styles can benefit from a very slight microphonic edge.

Secondly, it’s not necessarily a panacea. Potting can help reduce microphonic feedback but there can be many other contributors to feedback. If you’ve a problem, it’s worth considering everything in your signal chain.

This is a particularly handsome Heritage 535. It would be even more handsome if it were in one piece instead of two, though.

The neck’s come off and a little bit of investigation shows that it never stood a chance. This neck joint was weak from the start.

These joints are referred to as ‘mortice and tenon’ joints. In this case, the tenon (the bit at the end of the neck) was too small for the mortice (the ‘pocket’ in the body). As well as having a relatively large shim on one side, the tenon didn’t make contact with the bottom of the pocket. There’s an gap of a couple of millimetres between the two.

You can see the circled bits in the image. On the left is a chunk of mahogany from the tenon that’s split off and the glue line is visible on the right. You can see the gap.

That gap means no glue joint there. Only the sides are glued (well, those and the ‘face’ of the joint but that’s not providing a lot of strength).

This is a weak neck joint that was much more prone to fail that it ought to have been.

Rather than just gluing it back together, I’m going to build up the tenon to get this joint to where it should have been from the factory.

First off, that little chunk of mahogany that’s still glued to the side of the neck pocket has to be removed and glued back to the neck tenon. Once that’s done, I nab a new bit of mahogany and thickness it so that it will fill the gap.

In the right photo, you can see I’ve glued this on and cut it to match the shape of the existing tenon. The thickness of the added wood gives you an indication of how much of a gap there was.

I removed the old glue from both parts and re-glued the neck to the body. Because the break was quite clean, only a little touch-up work was required to get the guitar looking its best.

This repair looks good and, importantly, has actually resulted in a better, more sound, neck joint than when it left the factory.

OK, I’m going to have to be careful with this one as it would be easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of pickup polarities and phasing issues and, before anybody knew it, I’d have written a book to rival Britannica.

At a very, very high level, then, a humbucking pickup consists of two coils of wire (wrapped on plastic bobbins), a bar magnet and some ‘pole-pieces’. For the purposes of this discussion we can just concentrate on the two coils of wire and the magnet.

These two coils sit side by side (as you see in the photo). The magnet is a length of bar that sits underneath, basically in the middle. The bar-magnet has one side (not end) as a north pole and the other as a south pole. In this way, each of the wire coils is effectively magnetised with opposite polarites.

When these opposite-polarity coils are connected so they are electrically out-of-phase, (effectively one coil winds clockwise and the other anti-clockwise), the result is that much of the nasty interference that can be picked up is cancelled out while the actual string’s vibration isn’t. It’s a hum-cancelling (or bucking) pickup. Brilliant. Hurrah for Seth Lover and, the cruelly forgotten, Ray Butts.

Why am I telling you all of this? Mainly to seem impressive and knowledgable. I may grow my beard out, stroking it all the time, until it’s bushy and scholarly. Also, I’m telling you so the rest of this makes a bit of sense.

When two pickups are used in the same guitar, magnetic polarity and their coil-wrap directions can interact to cause different effects. There are other variables too but that’s a topic for another long, rambling post.

Generally, there’s an ‘accepted’ way to install pickups (but rules are made to be broken—experiment and maybe you’ll find a Peter Green sound or similar) and, mostly, you don’t need to worry about the polarity of each coil on your humbucker.

But sometimes you do. It’s difficult to give you a list of the times this is necessary but, for example, some guitars (some PRS and Ibanez models spring to mind) implement switching options that offer various coil-tap options and this can help keep mix positions hum-cancelling. To accommodate these options, sometimes one of the pickups has its magnetic polarity ‘flipped’. If you’re dropping in some new pickups to these guitars, it can sometimes be necessary to consider magnetic polarity to prevent things sounding weird or unpleasant.

Then, we flip the magnet ourselves. Here’s how to do it if you need to*.

Unwinding the wrapping around the coils reveals the hook-up wires. If you touch these, the world will end in a massive fireball of guitary doom. Don’t poke them. Leave them alone.

On the bottom of the pickup, the baseplate will have some screws holding the bobbins to it. Loosen these but just a little—you don’t want to bobbins to fall off.

Now, carefully, give the bar magnet a shove (away from the hook-up wires if they’re in the way). It will emerge like the photo on the right. When it’s out, don’t look away—flip it before you loose track (it can be a good idea to mark it with a fine permanent marker so you don’t go astray if you like).

When flipping, remember it’s NOT end to end. It flips in the ‘short’ direction. See the arrow in the photo? Flip it that way, 180º (one half rotation).

Reassemble and proceed with your wiring, content in the knowledge that your pickup’s magnetic polarity has been flipped. What was the north coil is now south and vice versa.

Now start growing your beard.

*A word of caution here. If you decide to try this yourself, be massively careful. Pickup coil wire is incredibly thin and delicate and will break if you look at it for too long. It’s that delicate. Also, if the whole pickup falls apart into many different pieces, it won’t be fun to put back together. This is an At Your Own Risk sort of job.

So, SageOne have named Haze Guitars as Business of the Month. 

Which is nice. 

They interviewed me about Haze Guitars and some broader topics related to my business. It was actually good fun and, let’s face it, I love chatting about this stuff. 

I work with SageOne for accounts services (which are actually quite handy) and it’s pretty cool that they’ve asked if they could feature Haze Guitars as their very first business of the month. Thanks to SageOne for this.

You can read their interview with me over at their blog. 

The Blue Collar sale is proving popular and I’m getting a couple of questions that are asked quite frequently—frequently asked questions, if you will. I’ll attempt to answer a couple of them here (mainly to save myself some effort in typing it multiple times as I’m terribly, terribly lazy).

• How much will it take to get my mitts on a wonderful Blue Collar?
  If you place an order in January, you’ll pay €350 as a deposit and, when the guitar’s ready, there’ll be €600 due—a paltry total of €950. Pretty good, eh?
• How long will it take to get my mitts on a wonderful Blue Collar?
  Depends a little on how many orders are on but if you assume 12-16 weeks, it’s probably a safe bet.
• Can I change the specs of my Blue Collar?
  Yep. No problem. That’s the beauty ordering a custom, hand-built instrument. Although the Blue Collar is fantastic as it is, you can tweak stuff. Want a different pickup or a second one? Sure thing. Want a mint green pickguard, gold hardware, shiny lacquer? No worries.
• Will it cost more if I change the specs?
  Depends what you’re looking for but, probably, yes. Give me a shout and we can discuss things and work out a quote.
• How much will the Blue Collar cost after January?
  After January, the cost of the Blue Collar will be €1150. You’re saving €200 if you stick in an order in the next week or two.
• Can I have a play of a Blue Collar to see how great it really is?
  Oh, you’re all flattery, aren’t you? Yep. No problem. If you pop around to Some Neck Guitars on Aungier Street in Dublin, you should find a Blue Collar to demo.
• How do I place an order?
  Just drop me a line and we’ll have a chat. Only the deposit is due on order. Bank transfers, cheques, drafts, and grimy wads of cash in brown envelopes are all ok. Once that’s sorted, I’ll start hammering nails into lumps of wood.

If I’ve missed anything, feel free to give me a shout.

Oh, right… The spec.

Haze Blue Collar Specifications

2-piece solid ash body
Maple neck (bolt-on)
Rosewood fingerboard (12″ radius) with 21 jumbo frets
Bone nut
Kluson tuners
Intonable wraparound tailpiece/bridge
B/W/B pickguard
Side mounted output-jack
Volume and tone control
Duesenberg Domino P-90 style pickup
Oil and wax finish.

Let’s be honest, that’s not an attractive bridge. It’s seen a lot of action over the years and it’s cracked and, somewhere in the distant past, it’s had some gunky filler splodged in to try extend its life.

And it’s actually a slightly odd bridge. Although it has six holes for bridge pins, you can see along the back there are some filled holes as if this bridge were once strung from the top. There are also two little pearl dots which are usually present to hide small bolts (as they do in this case). These bolts are generally used on bridges that string from the top. But, then, why the bridge-pin holes?

It seems likely that the manufacturer repurposed this bridge from another model, filled the string holes and installed with bolts as normal. Fair enough.

This is all an aside anyway. On to the real work.

The owner wants this sorted but I wasn’t able to source an off-the-shelf replacement. This means custom-malking a replacement.

Getting these things off is a pain—as well as the two little bolts under the pearl, this manufacturer epoxies the bridge in position. I may have used swear words.

Once off, though, I grab a nice piece of rosewood and thickness it to about the right height. I carefully measure and mark off the important dimensions, particularly the pin holes and the bolt holes—if these are misaligned or misplaced, the bridge has to go in the bin.

Some careful drilling and we’re ready to shape the bridge. In this case, it’s a (relatively) easy job as the original doesn’t have a lot of sharp edges to curves that need to be replicated. It’s easier to replicate those sweeping lines.

Re-attaching the bridge, in this case, means epoxy again. There’s a major risk of the bridge sliding about as it’s clamped so some very careful preparation was necessary to ensure this didn’t happen. Pin-holes and the bolts came in useful in this.

And, you can see the end result in the last image. As it’s a nicer piece of rosewood, I think the new bridge actually looks better than the original but, that aside, it’s certainly more sound.

1. Plug Haze Blue Collar into tasty valve amplifier.
2. Crank and play.
3. Attempt to calm terrified children and neighbours
4. Repeat at regular intervals.

Don’t forget, the Blue Collar is on sale this January. Check it out.

Yikes.

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you’ve probably spotted a few different examples of neck breaks. Most of these have been up at the headstock end as that’s the more likely place for a break.

It can happen down the other end too, though. This Les Paul took a tumble and broke in a nasty way. The exterior damage is obvious but it’s pretty certain that crack extends into the neck tenon too (the tenon’s the bit that gets glued into the neck pocket in the body).

This neck needs to come out to be properly repaired.

It’s not too often that I need to remove a Les Paul neck, which is lucky as it’s a relatively involved job. With a strong cup of tea to steel myself, I set to work.

First up, a few frets need to come out. To remove this neck, I need to soak and steam the glue out and that means getting access to the internals of the neck joint. I do this by drilling small ‘access’ holes. These are drilled in the fret slots. When it’s all done, I’ll fill the holes with rosewood plugs and re-cut the slots. All of this is hidden by the refitted frets.

Your eagle-eyes will have noticed a little dot on each (numbered) fret. These frets will be refitted and the dot tells me which is the bass end.

Keeping fingers crossed, I take a look under the neck pickup, hoping for a long tenon. No luck. If I could have seen the end of the tenon, I’d know exactly what size it was so I could position my holes to accurately access the sides of the neck joint  (if it’s not clear what I mean here, a photo later on might clarify things).

Since all of this tenon is hidden, I have to measure out the usual Gibson size and position for this guitar and hope that it’s built properly to spec.

In the photo, above on the right, you can see the pencil marks I’ve used to plot out the tenon and the holes I’ve drilled to get access to the joint.

This one’s a bit weird-looking, I’ll admit.

In the left image, I’m using a syringe to insert boiling water into the holes I’ve drilled. I give it a few seconds and then suck it back up again. What comes out is cooler water with some manky-looking dissolved glue. I repeat this process a lot over the course of a couple of days. A Les Paul neck joint is a hell of a strong joint and doing this gives me a little bit of a head start before I hit it with the steam.

Which is what’s happening on the right. That nozzle lets me get piping hot steam deep into the joint. The heat and moisture helps to dissolve more glue and, after some time and work, the glue eventually lets go…

…Leaving most of the bloody tenon still in the pocket. D’oh!

The heel crack extended into the tenon as we thought. Now I have to keep working to get this piece out with pretty much no leverage.

More tea required, I think.

Some steamy swearing later and it’s out. Now, in the side of that neck tenon, you can see the tracks of those holes I drilled earlier. We were right on the money with the positions too—nice.

And here’s the jigsaw we need to get back together. You’ll notice a small shim in the neck pocket. This was installed at the factory (it’s not uncommon) and I’ll reuse it for this repair.

All of the old glue is cleaned from the mortice and the tenon and then, the two bits of neck are glued back together. Again, the tracks of those access holes are clear in the photo on the right.

Once it’s sound again, the neck is reattached to the body. Those frets are reinstalled and all the frets are levelled to ensure clean playability.

Then, it’s just some touch-up to hide the evidence. As the rear and neck of this Les Paul are black, the opaque colour easily disguises the repair.

It took a bit of thought, a lot of work and twelve buckets of tea but this job’s a good ‘un.

Oh, man, you’re gonna love this.

Not content with offering half-price setups all this month but I can now announce the Haze Blue Collar will be on sale all through January too.

Any orders* for a Blue Collar build, placed in January, will be at the ridiculously low price of €950.

€950 for a hand-built Haze Blue Collar guitar.

When you place an order, you only pay a deposit of €350 with the balance payable when the guitar is completed. That’s gotta be good news for your post-Christmas wallet.

Pretty cool, eh?

The Blue Collar

Stripped-back brilliance. That’s what you get with a Haze Blue Collar. It’s built to play, and play hard. A slab-body and a single pickup gets you to the music with the minimum of fuss. And, damn, this pickup can growl, howl and sing. It’s a Duesenberg Domino—a fantastic P-90 style pickup with all of the tone and edge you’d expect.

Here, though, that P-90 sound is coupled to an ash body and a 25.5″-scale maple neck so the Blue Collar doesn’t lose focus or get muddy. It keeps its composure when others turn to mush. This makes it one tough little bruiser with a lot more versatility than you’d expect.

Blue Collar playability is something else. An oil and wax finish plays fast and slick and easy while the neck-carve (my own secret-sauce shaping) gives you one of the most comfortable handfuls you’ve ever played.

If you’d like to have a go on a Blue Collar to feel how great it plays and hear how great it sounds, pop into Some Neck Guitars on Aungier Street in Dublin. You can try out a Blue Collar there from Monday (and I’ll begrudgingly tell you that there are usually a LOT of other tasty guitars there too—it’s a place you really should check out).

How can I avail of this astounding value?

Good question.

To get your guitar-playing mitts on your very own Blue Collar, just drop me a line and we’ll get the ball rolling.

Seriously? €950. You’d be mad not to.

Haze Blue Collar Specification

2-piece solid ash body
Maple neck (bolt-on)
Rosewood fingerboard (12″ radius) with 21 jumbo frets
Bone nut
Kluson tuners
Intonable wraparound tailpiece/bridge
B/W/B pickguard
Side mounted output-jack
Volume and tone control
Duesenberg Domino P-90 style pickup
Oil and wax finish.

*Sale offer applies to orders placed with deposit up to 31st of January, 2013.

It’s here again: the Massive and Brilliant, Haze Guitars Super Setup Sale.

That means Haze-quality setups for stupid prices.

We’re talking any guitar for €25 (which includes fresh strings*) and any bass for €20 (strings extra if needed as some bassists only change strings twice in a lifetime).

This craziness applies to any instrument dropped off at my workshop between 2nd and 31st of January

Pretty great, eh?

So, I’ll be spending the month under a deluge of guitars. Every year I run this sale and spend all of January wondering if I’m a strange sort of masochist. Seriously, the effect is much like having someone spend the month beating me with a pillowcase full of stomp-boxes.

But I’m the selfless type with only your welfare in mind so I’ll make myself blind and mostly insane getting your guitars playing their best.

Guitar setup €25. Bass setup €20.

Frickin’ bargain or what?

*A Note on strings: D’addario on the electrics, Martin on the acoutics—if you need something else, I can use yours or source them and sort out any difference in cost.