Just beautiful Jahn. Maybe you want to bring it by Woodbury one night and jam with us?
1965 Starfire VI Reclamation Project
- Thread starter Jahn
- Start date
Fixit
Member
Jahn,
Great job! It looks great. How's it play and sound? Great I'll bet
I love those mini humbuckers.
Great job! It looks great. How's it play and sound? Great I'll bet
I love those mini humbuckers.
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2007
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Jahn said:
We have something going on in Oaks, near KOP mall in June... :wink:
Jahn said:
Actually Woodbury NY (Chazmo's hometown) on Long Island, right on the Nassau/Suffolk border. Are you anywhere close?
bluesypicky
Enlightened Member
Can't find a way to sum it up any better.... 8)twocorgis said:
twocorgis said:
Oh is that woodbury commons? i might get the wife locked into some retail therapy to buy me an hour or two muahaha...
and thanks all for the thumbs up on this Guild, it's really a great guitar. the Starfire VI inspired me to write a song last night! Nice and garagey sounding. I'd link it here but it has my horrible vocals all over it, if you really want to hunt for it, it's in my "Jahnli" youtube channel. Embarrassment notice over!
Probably the last update, as it's REALLY dialed in now. I put some flatwound strings by Thomastik Infeld, and found that with flatwounds i couldn't keep enough downward pressure on the floating bridge, so I removed the Vibramate to get more string angle going, and bingo - restringing far more annoying, but the end result is a taut ship at the business end, and I actually think the tone improved too. Well there you go, it's done unless I go the pickguard route, which I still don't think I'll do - I like how it looks sans guard, really!
SFIV1967
Venerated Member
Jahn: This top looks wonderful without the pickguard! Oh, and I love that '57 Deluxe, how nice is that!
Ralf
Ralf
well i kept saying to myself that the neck pickup didn't remind me of the badassery of the mini HB-1 that I loved in my previous starfires, so i knew I had to fish some electronics back out using the aquarium tubing.
doing so is a PAIN so i avoided it and procrastinated for months. heck i almost convinced myself that i couldn't do it, i tried my best, and i'd let a pro do it. however, i called around and found that the pros charge a bench fee of 85 bucks an hour for labor in NYC. no thanks. so here comes the tubes!
the easiest to fish out are the selector switch and master volume, so i crossed my fingers that the problem was there, and pulled just those out. turns out, the problem was indeed there. check out the lovely soldering job on that master volume pot:
so i pulled out my solder sucker and solder wick and cleaned all the crap off as best i could, then i doublechecked the right wiring via this schematic (since i couldn't find one of a starfire with a master volume, i used the starfire BASS haha:
turned out it would do just fine to make certain everything was grounded and connected to the master volume pot and selector switch properly. so i did that as best as i could, and OH NO THE TUBING FELL OFF THE POT. I started to grind my teeth until I thought - hold on, why did i master the art of chopstickery if not for this very moment?
This, plus my prodigious skills gained by playing the boardgame "Operation" with my kid, helped me snag it with the grippy washer still spooled on the tube. popped the pot shaft back on the tube, and bingo. spritzed some contact cleaner on the pot and the switch just for good measure too. stuck everything back where it belonged, and fired it up using the tweed deluxe. SUCCESS. the neck's HB-1 was LOUD and proud! i actually had to lower the pickup to not overpower the bridge, whee! best of all, this enlivened my fave position, the middle position, where i could twiddle both pickup volumes to get into my sweet spot - mission accomplished!
so there you go, have no fear folks - it'll just take four hours of your life and a lot of cursing and sweating and crossing of fingers and gnashing of teeth (and a change of strings too, why not, i'm trying those ernie ball Cobalts, pretty cool) but now everything is right in the world, aaaahhhhh.
doing so is a PAIN so i avoided it and procrastinated for months. heck i almost convinced myself that i couldn't do it, i tried my best, and i'd let a pro do it. however, i called around and found that the pros charge a bench fee of 85 bucks an hour for labor in NYC. no thanks. so here comes the tubes!
the easiest to fish out are the selector switch and master volume, so i crossed my fingers that the problem was there, and pulled just those out. turns out, the problem was indeed there. check out the lovely soldering job on that master volume pot:
so i pulled out my solder sucker and solder wick and cleaned all the crap off as best i could, then i doublechecked the right wiring via this schematic (since i couldn't find one of a starfire with a master volume, i used the starfire BASS haha:
turned out it would do just fine to make certain everything was grounded and connected to the master volume pot and selector switch properly. so i did that as best as i could, and OH NO THE TUBING FELL OFF THE POT. I started to grind my teeth until I thought - hold on, why did i master the art of chopstickery if not for this very moment?
This, plus my prodigious skills gained by playing the boardgame "Operation" with my kid, helped me snag it with the grippy washer still spooled on the tube. popped the pot shaft back on the tube, and bingo. spritzed some contact cleaner on the pot and the switch just for good measure too. stuck everything back where it belonged, and fired it up using the tweed deluxe. SUCCESS. the neck's HB-1 was LOUD and proud! i actually had to lower the pickup to not overpower the bridge, whee! best of all, this enlivened my fave position, the middle position, where i could twiddle both pickup volumes to get into my sweet spot - mission accomplished!
so there you go, have no fear folks - it'll just take four hours of your life and a lot of cursing and sweating and crossing of fingers and gnashing of teeth (and a change of strings too, why not, i'm trying those ernie ball Cobalts, pretty cool) but now everything is right in the world, aaaahhhhh.
SFIV1967
Venerated Member
Hi Jahn: Great job again!
Just for future reference, here is a Starfire 6 wiring diagram:
Go to: http://www.retrevo.com/support/Guild-St ... bh629/t/2/
Go to "Download" on that page and it takes a few seconds to download, a second page opens and there you need to enter a number as shown on that page.
Ralf
Just for future reference, here is a Starfire 6 wiring diagram:
Go to: http://www.retrevo.com/support/Guild-St ... bh629/t/2/
Go to "Download" on that page and it takes a few seconds to download, a second page opens and there you need to enter a number as shown on that page.
Ralf
Jahn said:Fixit said:
The more I look at this, the more I think I want to port my '67 caps over to my '65 Starfire, which have pretty plain jane ceramic disk caps on there. Instead, it would be fun to get the .01 WIMA on the neck, and the .047 Mullard on the bridge, which should wake up the neck and tame down the bridge. Hmm!
Well I finally got up the courage to do this job, haha! While I was in there, I took the very too short pickup leads off and used longer ones from the '67 Starfire IV harness - you can tell which they are since they are grey instead of the '65's original black leads - makes it even easier to know which wire is what now!
So I went in there again with my chopsticks and aquarium tubing and all that, and swapped out the ceramic disc cap that was on the neck's tone pot. It was a very very murky .047 that didn't seem to do much at all for the tone pot - honestly you'd think it was broken because it was murk murk murk until supermurk when maxed.
So I took the .01 WIMA cap from the '67 harness and used it to replace that cap. The ceramic disc cap actually said .05 on it, so yikes on that. Anyhow the difference is night and day - now when you roll down the tone pot, you get a nice smooth measurable USABLE range all the way down to dark. I would swear that the neck pickup also seems a bit punchier/livelier too, but maybe that's my imagination, or the effect of resoldering fresh leads or something.
So how about that .047 Mullard? Turns out that the legs on the Mullard mustard cap would be too short to wrap around the '65 pot the way it should, with one on the pot leg and the other grounded on the pot's back. Anyhow, I'm thinking of going with a .022 cap for the bridge in the future instead, since there's a .047 ceramic disc cap on there now and it's - you guessed it - super murky and seems to do very little. I don't want to go .01 though, it might be a bit much for a bridge pickup!
So there you go, a bit of tinkering done - and of course i kept the old black leads and the old cap (cool that one leg still had a cloth sleeve on it, old school). Oh, and I wanted to crank down the neck pickup a bit more since it can be overpowering compared to the bridge pickup (and if i cranked up the bridge pickup height any more it would cause Strat-i-tis and choke out string vibration), so I reached into my bag of old Guild parts and used two longer pickup height adjustment screws from an old Nightbird of all things. Worked like a charm, the neck is still strong but now less overpowering of the bridge.
The middle position used to be my fave position with this guitar - mix of both pickups. But these days I actually really like the neck only position, and the tone pot improvement via the WIMA has made it far more versatile. Good times!
Edit - now i know why the good times stopped rolling in the middle position - i think maybe i reversed the leads for the bridge pickup when I got in there last, whoops! I'll switch them back when I get home, to get the middle position back loud and strong!
So I had time today to go ahead and flip the leads for the bridge pickup, so now the middle position doesn't go low volume and too quacky now. Also, my Sprague .018 cap came, so I replaced the bridge tone cap that was there - a .047 ceramic disc that made the tone pot seem like it did nothing. Well, with the cap switch the bridge tone pot is totally usable now, along its entire throw! You can see the .01 WIMA cap peeking out from the neck tone pot there in the F-hole, it's the red square chicklet there.
once in a while i get a nasty rattle- it's the bass side bridge wheel shaking loose and I have to tension it all the time. so i did a little loctite drop on it to keep it from screwing around today. no more rattling bridge!
Well the leads from the pickup switch to the master volume pot weren't long enough - they kept popping the grounds loose. So I spliced some wiring from the '67 harness onto the master vol pot, swapped out the somewhat sticky '65 pickup switch for the fully functioning '67 pickup switch (basically the same switch, the original switch tip screwed right on there) and bingo, the electronics are finally all sorted.
But I'm getting restoration fatigue. I'm going to put an inquiry in with Kim of the Guild Custom Shop to see what we'd need to do to get this thing back up to Full Glory instead of just-enough Player, you know? I feel bad that all my TLC still ends up with a Starfire that is still a bit creaky, and doesn't hold intonation quite right like I know it should.
Edit - some nut sauce and some moving of the bigsby bridge and a bit of nut filing got the squeaking and intonation under control - but still no divebombing on the bigsby allowed (not that I play that way anyhow!) - so yet again, the Starfire VI is back to fighting condition, although I still am very tempted just to hand this one over to Guild for an Extreme Makeover. Here's today's cheesecake shot after I put the tools away!
But I'm getting restoration fatigue. I'm going to put an inquiry in with Kim of the Guild Custom Shop to see what we'd need to do to get this thing back up to Full Glory instead of just-enough Player, you know? I feel bad that all my TLC still ends up with a Starfire that is still a bit creaky, and doesn't hold intonation quite right like I know it should.
Edit - some nut sauce and some moving of the bigsby bridge and a bit of nut filing got the squeaking and intonation under control - but still no divebombing on the bigsby allowed (not that I play that way anyhow!) - so yet again, the Starfire VI is back to fighting condition, although I still am very tempted just to hand this one over to Guild for an Extreme Makeover. Here's today's cheesecake shot after I put the tools away!
BTW, to gilded, your Private Message box is full so I can't send you a reply, so I hope you see this post!
Sure did, here it is, bottom of page 6!
http://letstalkguild.com/ltg/showthread.php?169166-1965-Starfire-VI-Reclamation-Project/page6
I had the brass one, but on a Gretsch Country Gent, so I can't really compare the tones since they were completely different types of guitars in tone. But I really like these bridges - the strings don't pop out, they are solid in construction and sound, and look "right" on an old semi too!
By the way, the Starfire's with the Guild Custom Shop right now for some work I couldn't handle on my own, like a neck reset and a refin and all that. I'll definitely post an update once it's back!
gilded said:
Sure did, here it is, bottom of page 6!
http://letstalkguild.com/ltg/showthread.php?169166-1965-Starfire-VI-Reclamation-Project/page6
I had the brass one, but on a Gretsch Country Gent, so I can't really compare the tones since they were completely different types of guitars in tone. But I really like these bridges - the strings don't pop out, they are solid in construction and sound, and look "right" on an old semi too!
By the way, the Starfire's with the Guild Custom Shop right now for some work I couldn't handle on my own, like a neck reset and a refin and all that. I'll definitely post an update once it's back!