Daudling Down The Runway

Well, I’m pleased to say that The J-Bird One is finally moving. The Christmas deadline is going to be unlikely, but hopefully the temperatures warm up a wee bit, New Year might still be possible, time will tell, I guess.

However, as far as the neck goes – which if you remember we are aiming to turn vaguely Firebird-esque, by chopping bits off an old leftie ‘70s Fender Strat style of headstock bobbins – we are in with a hope.

I put my ‘artists impression’ up the other week, and this I’ve now transferred to the headstock. It needed a bit of a tweak here and there, and I dismembered a Sugar Puffs packet along the way, but at least the wider outline is there now, and it has given me the chance to cut that.

How to do it was the first question. I thought about a saw, or even my shiny new router, but the safest bet seemed to do it handraulically, so I started the slow and painfilled task of filing it down by hand.

And this is where I am with it. Still sanding - I'm going to use a leccy sander for a bit though.

As for the body, once the routing out is done (I've been practising and today is the day), I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll be applying the comic and then spraying it with a transparent, blue-tinted nitro lacquer. Once that is done and rock solid, we’ll apply the logo and then clear coat it. This will all be quite thin coats, so hopefully drying time won’t kill us if the weather warms up a tad, but I must admit things are tight, but better to get it right…

The J-Bird wiring is without doubt the most ambitious thing I’ve tried to date. First of all, we’ve got a humbucker at the bridge and a traditional P90 at the neck. After lots of looking around, I’m having these both wound by Allan at Catswhisker, after the awesome service and pickup he supplied for the Fat Pussy one. I’ve really been impressed where it counts in both cases.

Obviously, once we have the pickups we need to decide to wire them, and given Andy’s musical interests, for both gigging and recording, the one thing he was totally clear about was that he wanted loads of options.

Sooo…from the top, we’re going for a kinda enhanced set of features. For those of you who know what I mean by the ‘Jimmy Page modification’ when I say that is just a starting point, you’ll probably see what I mean.

In terms of controls, given the difference in the pickups, it makes sense to have two volume and two tone controls.

Each of these, as far as the Jimmy Page goes are put in with push-pull pots, for splitting coils on the pickups and flicking to series and parallel etc.

In our case, we’re going that route, but also complicating things further by introducing a series of on-board effects, which will be controlled by a rotary switch that will replace one of the tone pots. (We lose the coil split on the P90 as that seems to be the least useful in this case).

Just to finish things off, there is also going to be a Kill switch, a la Rage Against The Machine.

All of which is quite daunting, but I’m happy that I’ve sketched it out now and it all seems feasible. Just hope my hand doesn’t carrying on shaking like recently, as I’m not sure I’d be wanting to ask the local tech-type to sort this one out for me…

But there we are, I said I wanted to make something interesting when I first talked about the Katy’s Killer Customs, and man, shaped headstocks, paper and nitro finishes, serious electronics…well, I think I can safely say I got my wish granted…