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I completely forgot to close the loop on this thread. In the end the repair went perfectly and I’ve been happily playing this guitar ever since the repair. My homemade preamp has worked wonders and sounds great; the battery lasts more than long enough and all’s well that ends well. In fact I...

Exactly that: I bought an OM set, but they’d already sold the last one. Instead they offered the dreadnaught size. I already have a design in mind for headstock inlay and you’re damn right I’ll use every last scrap of BR if I can. The luthier making the guitar has some 70 year aged Sitka...

Day #112 and my Guild is still at the shop. The luthier is going to do yet more buffing and nitro to get it as close to smooth as possible. The glacial speed of nitro curing is now the primary cause of the slow-paced repair job. In other news (and I won't start another topic here, but I just...

Maybe he charges me nothing and I buy him a bottle of good whisky as thanks for making it right. Edit: I know there's a chance some folks will think "you're going to buy him good whisky as thanks for breaking your guitar??!?!? Are you mad?!?", but that's not how I see it. The mistake isn't the...

It's funny because I agree with that sentiment... But assuming he finishes the job of fashioning a new nut and saddle, and he does the work of fitting the pickup and jack, then he's still done work that I asked him to do and for which I agreed to pay! But then again, he's wrecked the value of...

Poor chap must've shat his pants.

Yes. He was reaming the hole in the block to enlarge it in preparation for installing a pickup jack... and it just... exploded.

My luthier has opted for cleats. The glue joint at the block will have the strength to stop it pulling apart the back from the soundboard, but lateral movement of the crack is too much of a risk without cleats. It's been nearly about 9 weeks since he broke it and we're finally in the last rounds...

I know you've all been waiting with baited breath for an update on this... ;) The luthier has mostly glued up the split with only a small section on one side to go. He's trying to avoid using cleats if possible (his rationale is that he tries to avoid adding wood mass during repairs), and he's...

I’m not too worried. My luthier is a stand-up bloke and when he says he’ll make it right he’ll make it right. Post-repair it’ll have a couple more battle scars is all.

Disaster. I decided to take the Guild to my local luthier, who’s great and worked on a bunch of my guitars, to have the block drilled out for the K&K pickup. He called me today to say things hadn’t gone according to plan. I am sad about this.

I finished up the preamp today! In order to squeeze everything into the tiny enclosure I ended up using an externally-mounted Switchcraft 227 plug: It's mounted to the plate of the enclosure using some small bolts/nuts held fast with Loctite Threadlocker Red: To power the preamp I opted for...

And back to the scheduled programming! Bob Colosi’s bridge pins, nut and saddle arrived and I found a few hours to put into shaping things and fitting them. They’re still rough cut just now - the saddle needs lowered slightly and the nut slots still need work, but it’s getting there. The saddle...

My day job is in cybersecurity! Hacking and reverse-engineering both hardware and software are my daily bread; guitar stuff is my catharsis.

Having decided to go with an 18V supply rail for the preamp, I built a small 9V - 18V boost circuit based on my prototype. I again used only parts from my collection (I don't want to buy anything else, I've hoarded enough!!) and it turned out really well. It consists of: LT1054...

K&K specify an input impedance of 1M Ohm due to high input impedances causing the bass response to become overblown and boomy: Based on this I built my preamp with a 1meg input impedance.

This is what I concluded through observation. The initial transient is - like I said earlier - disproportionately massive compared to the rest of the signal. When it clips (and it will clip/overdrive most, if not all, low-voltage / low-headroom preamps) I'll bet it sounds like sh!t. Quack quack...

For sh!ts and giggles I put together a voltage doubling circuit made from an LT1054 charge pump I had lying around: It’s using 10uF film caps for absolutely the best ESR I could find. The diodes are old germanium NOS ones that have super low forward voltage of 190mV!! Modern silicon ones are...

"Uses two "AA" batteries" That's only 3V. I bet he's using something like a LT1054 charge pump to increase the voltage. I considered it, but those things work by using a switching oscillator at around 40kHz (if I recall correctly) and (a) they take more current than I want to use, and (b) the...

What's the power source, two 9Vs in series? I'm cautious about that because it'll double the internal resistance / output impedance of the power supply, which is bad in audio applications.