This was supposed to be something on
parts sources, so I will say that
I got the tuners and pickup parts from
guitarpartsusa,
whom I recommend. I didn't want to deal with an ebay dealer (I am
over 50, after all, and I
couldn't figure out how to do it), and guitarpartsusa was a good
alternative. They answer stupid questions quickly, take your money, and
ship the parts right away. What else could one want? I would've got the
24" "Martin-style" aluminum-channel trussrod from there as well, but
they didn't have it in stock. So that came from
StewMac.. I got a
preamp kit from
Jameco,
but it's not quite right for the application (it specs max. 0.04v
input). So I'll cook up a simple op-amp preamp from a plan in the book
Electronics
Projects for Guitarists.
I started thinking about how the bass
will fit in a case or gigbag, and that took me back to the drawing
board for how the tuners are set up. It would not be good to have the
tuning keys sticking up above everything else like they were in my
earlier design. When I pulled
out my drawings on the computer, I realized that I had the measurements
all wrong, that the tuners are a bunch bigger in life than in my pretty
pictures. So I had to abandon mounting them sideways,
classical-guitar-wise. I was having a nasty time trying to visualize
how everything could fit together, so I cooked it up in
google sketchup,
which is a lot of work but worth it. Below are size-reduced versions of
the flat pix I've generated from the sketchup model.
