Wednesday, April 15

Bragging Rights

o

When I get bored I watch TV or read or go for a walk or call a friend....stuff. When my brother gets bored he turns a 6 string electric guitar into a 12-string. What? Not sure where he got his technical ability from but from me it was definitely NOT.

For those of you who understand instruments/music this is what he did:


-17 hours work totall
-total cost $20 (I only had to buy the strings, and a small file set)
-Got the idea from Jeremie, who was only joking at the time

First thing I'm going to address, the controls;
There is no pick-up selector switch, I took it out and put in 3 volume knobs. And yes that is a volume slider, the volume slider is a master volume. Each volume knob controls 1 pick-up, so that is how you select your pickups (this allows for very nice tone controll). That black button is a kill-switch (that mod was actually made BEFORE it was being turned into a 12 string).

Secondly,
That one machine head** (AKA tuning pegs) looks a little funny because there wasn't enough room on the headstock to actually fit it on straight. The nut alone (white thing at the top of the neck before the tuning pegs) took me 4 hours to file the correct size grooves for each corresponding string gauge. That bar on the headstock between the nut and the machine heads was a last minute mod I had to make to make sure the strings have enough downward tension to the nut.
I had the machine heads just laying around.

Third,
The neck is staying very straight under the added weight of 6 more strings, I don't know how.

Fourth,
The saddles on the bridge I actually just flipped over and cut 2 grooves in each one with a dremmel for the strings. Some are better than others, but they all work.


There are still a few problems with the intonation (if anyone knows what that is) that I can't seem to fix, but it's not noticable if playing below the 7th fret

A photo-grapher he is not but I think he'll be ok without that skill.

**the only thing I think about with Machine Head is the old Bush song.

2 comments:

Beth said...

i was just skimming this post, and at first i thought YOU did that...but it makes much more sense that it is your brother. (no offense)

Silas said...

that is pretty intense i must say