OffsetGuitars.com

Currently? A giant ADHD induced mess. I need to clean it. LOL

Haha. Same.

Satellite. PT2399 lo-fi digital delay with touch sensitive modulation!

Custom Powerful Booster in Orange/Yellow.

I'm trying to quit smoking/e-cigs and have the need to keep my hands busy. So I took out my Vibro Champ chassis and spent a few hours casually sorting/OCD'ing the lead dress and straightening a few of the components that were installed sloppily over it's life.

It's not perfect as some of the existing wired weren't long enough to get my angles in, but I wasn't going to tear out original wire for no reason so compromised...

Before:



After:

Dave Reeves would be proud.

hulakatt wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 18, 2024 2:19 am

Dave Reeves would be proud.

Reeves will always be my wiring ground (lol) zero.

I need to build another amp soon I think. Not that I even use the last one, I just enjoy making them.

JSett wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 18, 2024 1:20 am

After:

Neat job!
Every time I see a picture like this I think to myself "that looks easy, I can do that!" but then I look at amp kits and schematics and suddenly the task seems pretty daunting.

Steadyriot. wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 18, 2024 2:42 am

JSett wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 18, 2024 1:20 am

Neat job!
Every time I see a picture like this I think to myself "that looks easy, I can do that!" but then I look at amp kits and schematics and suddenly the task seems pretty daunting.

Same here!
Heres a great alternative..
Examle of layouts found on robrobinette.com

Made it so easy for me to go from fuzz pedal straight to Twin reverb build.

Much like painting by numbers, I did have some soldering experience prior tho..

The Jag a few days ago between string changes and to lubricate the vibrato plate, clean around the pickups etc without fully disassembling it, as it gets played a lot these days.

The Mastery bridge in particular was a little gunked up so I decided to give it a little clean and I figured while I was there I'd snap a few pics as it's the older kind and they've subtly changed the design since then.



Here is the old "patent pending" text, plus if you look at the bridge posts they're non-standard. Stock it came with the same triangular pointed grub screws that the stock bridge does so I always assumed it would share the same weakness, which is that the bridge would sink sooner or later. Rather than take that risk I substituted the grub screws for the retainer screws from an old VGA port on a busted desktop PC GPU which were a perfect fit and ever since I got the action right, have never moved nor needed to be moved (I kept the little springs on so maybe that helped but I think it would have stayed put without it). Basically the tradeoff is you can't change the bridge height without removing the bridge and adjusting it by hand, however to prevent it from sinking it's a solid choice. Greater points of contact to the thimbles as well, for whatever that's worth, and the Mastery bridge rocks back and forth under vibrato use much the same.

My shot isn't great so it's these :-



The little retainer screws on either side of the blue port, basically. It's a trick that also worked on the stock bridge and two different Mustang bridges that were on the Jag prior to the Mastery, which has stayed on the guitar. I've looked into the Halon bridges but I find they sound more acoustically dead, whereas the Mastery has a lot of brightness which I need to counterbalance the hotter pickups I run with.



Literally had it so long that my hand has rubbed off some of the MASTERY text - it's still there but it's fading. That's a damn fine bridge, and I've never found the saddles to dig into my hands as some people sadly have found with more modern iterations - it's perfectly smooth.

crazyzeke wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 18, 2024 4:38 am

Literally had it so long that my hand has rubbed off some of the MASTERY text - it's still there but it's fading. That's a damn fine bridge, and I've never found the saddles to dig into my hands as some people sadly have found with more modern iterations - it's perfectly smooth.

I have a couple of OG pat pend Masterys and they never sank at all, maybe I'm just lucky.

Question: How does your hand rub off the text thats UNDER the strings, on a different 3d plane to where your hand actually touches?

Allow me to post my latest mundane repair.

Another thread on here got me thinking about my old Strat. So, I dug it out and decided to show it some love. And man alive, did this take a lot of work.

Nothing crazy. Just heat bending the neck into a back bow, a level/crow/polish, repairing broken pickup bobbin, and the soldiering involved with Strats any time you want to remove the pick guard.

Which brings me to, for all their ubiquity, Strats are incredibly odd ducks as guitars and kind of a pain in the ass to work on. If I was doing the tech/luth gig for money (which I might), I'd consider charging maybe a little more for them. Problem is, half of guitars on earth are stratoids.

Anyway. Pretty pleased with the outcome. Time to rock.

JSett wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 18, 2024 8:08 am

Question: How does your hand rub off the text thats UNDER the strings, on a different 3d plane to where your hand actually touches?

I assumed that's what it was due to palm muting but I just checked and I was like, huh, my hand doesn't really get that near the logo. Perhaps it's something else like sun wear. No idea. Just remember when I bought it I figured the logo would stay black forever, but having visible wear is kinda cool, shows how much it's been used.

Back to its original 1984/5 glory. I had swapped out the loaded pickguard for a black one with Ken Rose pickups, which were great, but when I put the originals back I realised I should have left them be. They're different to the later MIJ ones - wider winding, for all I know they could be US made given how common that was in the early MIJ high end models. And that body grain ...

MattK wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 19, 2024 3:07 pm

And that body grain ...

I'm not really a fan of sunburst but, yes, the grain in that is *chef's kiss*