I have a Japanese SG copy with a decent bolt-on maple neck and what appears to be a clear plexiglass or acrylic body. The body is strong, but way too rubbery at the neck heel mount. I can't stand the real Gibson SG because it bends and doesn't stay in tune, due to the double cutaways and close proximity of the deep humbucker rout trench for the neck pickup. There's just not enough wood left! But...I was used to a Travis Bean. There was one SG with an extra-thick maple body from a custom shop that worked...but this cheapo plastic body guitar is simply unplayable.
Yet I look at "skunk" Baxter's thick-body acrylic Strat and it's obvious (I was oging to say it's CLEAR) this can be made to work.
The acrylic SG body doesn't have a conventional heel socket for an undesize glue-in or even bolt-on neck. There is no socket wall along the cutouts! It's more like an acrylic tongue for the neck to bolt to, so the body's neck "socket" is not a socket, and has no "C" cross-section for stability front-to-back. I keep thinking of Pete Townsend getting vibrato from shaking his SG; this one does it unintentionally, and it also affects the action.
So, this is how I hope to fix this problem:
I got the last of the discontinued Alumintone low-profile pickups with the "humbucker" mounting format. They don't require a deep routed out pickup cavity.
So the first question is how to fill the pickup cavity to restore strength to the body in that area. I could just pour in some clear Envirotex epoxy, in multiple thin layers to avoid major contraction cracking. Or I could glue in an acrylic puck. Or I could attempt to also simultaneously add some shielding, and glue in a block of metal with a ground wire. That possibility brings up the question of whether to go for high-permeabilty metal like mumetal, magnetic or non-magnetic stainless, or lighter aluminum? The cavity is not visible from the front anyway because the pickup covers it.
Some metals will really affect the tone when placed near the pickups, just because they distort the magnetic flux pattern. For instance a Telecaster sounds different when the bridge pickup is not mounted on the stock steel bridge cover base. I remember Bill Lawrence mentioning that an aluminum pickguard or shield seemed to work well without ruining the tone...though it seems to me to have very low magnetic permeability. So obviously there's more than one kind of shielding...
I suspect the Alumitone pickups may be much less susceptible to performance changes due to proximity to magnetic materials. But I really haven't investigated sufficiently.
I'm personally inclined to use multiple kinds of metal. I'd like to pour a thin layer of clear epoxy, then glue in a block of aluminum, and top it off with some more epoxy. Ideally I should sand-blast or somehow roughen the aluminum for better adhesion to the epoxy. I suppose it should have a ground wire? Then perhaps I'll try a removable mumetal shield on all sides of the remaining shallow cavity?
Then, I've also made a larger, longer, thicker aluminum plate to replace the stock heel plate for anchoring the neck-mounting screw heads. I first made just a longer plate. Then I made another that is much wider (a little wider than the neck, extending a litlle into the area of the "wings" created by the neck-access cutouts in the body) and that is also much longer (extending under the neck and bridge pickups and almost to the bridge). I'm obviously not at all concerned about the aluminum affecting the damping of the body material (it's plastic and hardly "tonewood" to begin with). That area is covered by a pickguard anyway, so it will not be visible from the front. I rounded it nicely. I don't want to, but if it causes any problems I could even rout a shallow recess into the back of the body and recess the plate a bit, but I really don't want to make the too-thin body thinner.
So if I embed aluminum pucks in the bottom of the pickup cavities, I'll also drill and tap them to bolt this new body-brace backplate / neck-heel bolt-plate to the back of the body at each pickup as well as at the neck mount. The Travis Bean does something similar, but its aluminum spine extends all the way to anchor the bridge (and thru the neck obviously).
Then, one last issue: I am interested in replacing the plastic pickguard with one made of rather sturdy stainless. I'm not even sure whether the mirror-polished stainless sheets I have are magnetic alloy or not? I'm hoping they don't affect the magnetic flux or sound of the pickups, and if they do I may need to use plastic around the pickups and stainless elsewhere.
I'm hoping it still ends up lighter and thinner than a Les Paul but stable enough to be playable.
Any and all ideas and opinions are encouraged and welcomed. The truth is that if I had a real SG, at the risk of committing sacrilige, I would probably bolt an aluminum brace plate on the back!
Yet I look at "skunk" Baxter's thick-body acrylic Strat and it's obvious (I was oging to say it's CLEAR) this can be made to work.
The acrylic SG body doesn't have a conventional heel socket for an undesize glue-in or even bolt-on neck. There is no socket wall along the cutouts! It's more like an acrylic tongue for the neck to bolt to, so the body's neck "socket" is not a socket, and has no "C" cross-section for stability front-to-back. I keep thinking of Pete Townsend getting vibrato from shaking his SG; this one does it unintentionally, and it also affects the action.
So, this is how I hope to fix this problem:
I got the last of the discontinued Alumintone low-profile pickups with the "humbucker" mounting format. They don't require a deep routed out pickup cavity.
So the first question is how to fill the pickup cavity to restore strength to the body in that area. I could just pour in some clear Envirotex epoxy, in multiple thin layers to avoid major contraction cracking. Or I could glue in an acrylic puck. Or I could attempt to also simultaneously add some shielding, and glue in a block of metal with a ground wire. That possibility brings up the question of whether to go for high-permeabilty metal like mumetal, magnetic or non-magnetic stainless, or lighter aluminum? The cavity is not visible from the front anyway because the pickup covers it.
Some metals will really affect the tone when placed near the pickups, just because they distort the magnetic flux pattern. For instance a Telecaster sounds different when the bridge pickup is not mounted on the stock steel bridge cover base. I remember Bill Lawrence mentioning that an aluminum pickguard or shield seemed to work well without ruining the tone...though it seems to me to have very low magnetic permeability. So obviously there's more than one kind of shielding...
I suspect the Alumitone pickups may be much less susceptible to performance changes due to proximity to magnetic materials. But I really haven't investigated sufficiently.
I'm personally inclined to use multiple kinds of metal. I'd like to pour a thin layer of clear epoxy, then glue in a block of aluminum, and top it off with some more epoxy. Ideally I should sand-blast or somehow roughen the aluminum for better adhesion to the epoxy. I suppose it should have a ground wire? Then perhaps I'll try a removable mumetal shield on all sides of the remaining shallow cavity?
Then, I've also made a larger, longer, thicker aluminum plate to replace the stock heel plate for anchoring the neck-mounting screw heads. I first made just a longer plate. Then I made another that is much wider (a little wider than the neck, extending a litlle into the area of the "wings" created by the neck-access cutouts in the body) and that is also much longer (extending under the neck and bridge pickups and almost to the bridge). I'm obviously not at all concerned about the aluminum affecting the damping of the body material (it's plastic and hardly "tonewood" to begin with). That area is covered by a pickguard anyway, so it will not be visible from the front. I rounded it nicely. I don't want to, but if it causes any problems I could even rout a shallow recess into the back of the body and recess the plate a bit, but I really don't want to make the too-thin body thinner.
So if I embed aluminum pucks in the bottom of the pickup cavities, I'll also drill and tap them to bolt this new body-brace backplate / neck-heel bolt-plate to the back of the body at each pickup as well as at the neck mount. The Travis Bean does something similar, but its aluminum spine extends all the way to anchor the bridge (and thru the neck obviously).
Then, one last issue: I am interested in replacing the plastic pickguard with one made of rather sturdy stainless. I'm not even sure whether the mirror-polished stainless sheets I have are magnetic alloy or not? I'm hoping they don't affect the magnetic flux or sound of the pickups, and if they do I may need to use plastic around the pickups and stainless elsewhere.
I'm hoping it still ends up lighter and thinner than a Les Paul but stable enough to be playable.
Any and all ideas and opinions are encouraged and welcomed. The truth is that if I had a real SG, at the risk of committing sacrilige, I would probably bolt an aluminum brace plate on the back!