Yorgle

I think connectors in general are a good idea. It's nice to be able to completely remove the pickups for polishing or cleaning the instrument, rather than have them dangling around and potentially scratching the finish. Just be sure the connectors are good quality because they have to stay snug in an environment that's designed to vibrate at lots of frequencies.

You first need to ascertain the condition of the neck and frets before you adjust anything, e.g., is the fingerboard bowed or twisted; are the frets (or some of them) excessively worn; are the saddles worn? If you have a true straight edge and an hour or so, you can probably figure out what the issue is. If you can't find what's causing the problem, take the instrument to a luthier. If you can't afford that, you can raise the bridge on the treble side until the buzz goes away (and live with the higher action). But whatever you do, don't give into the temptation to simply hammer or file the 18th fret lower because you'll find that now the 19th fret buzzes, then the 20th, and so on. Been there, done that...

I'd try changing out the tone capacitor before spending $$$ on pickups. For whatever reason, 99% of guitars have either .22 or .47 uF tone caps regardless of pickups. I've found that you can use much lower value caps to really brighten things up and give your tone pot more effect. I've got a 6800 pF in my Wildkat and I love it.

It may be be mahogany, but don't expect it to be one piece. The body blanks are usually made from 3 or 4 (or more) boards glued together.

So it is. My bad.

Thanks for bringing it back. Sorry to see no reference to the Alleykat or Wildkat, though. :(

This is the one I'm talking about:

Did Epiphone ever use Gibson's "flower pot" logo on a guitar? I know I've seen it on an Epi mandolin, but never on a guitar. Just curious, that's all.

All back together:

I accidentally reclic'd my Wildkat this weekend- tipped over my guitar stand and a quarter-size chunk of the polyester finish cracked off by the cutout. My attempts to sand the area flat and re-coat with some clear failed because I ended up sanding through the colored layer all the way to the veneer. (Did you hear that, Rev6? It's got veneer!) Anyway, after trying several times to match Epiphone's mysterious yellow grain filler, I gave up and decided to do something drastic. Stay tuned for pics after I do some final wetsand/polishing. Reborn as a goldtop:

Added a home-made zero fret: I can't say it really sounds that much different, but I like the concept of both fretted and open strings being treated the same. I also replaced the chrome phillips head screws on the headstock badge with more vintage looking brass slotted head screws. It's a subtle change, but I think it looks better. I'm going to do the same with the truss cover screws.

Indeed a beauty! That 6-way switch is a great idea- I might explore using one now that I've added some piezo's to my Wildkat.

My reason is primarily to see what, if any, affect the plastic covers have on the sound of the pickups, and figured that cream would match the switch tip on my Wildkat, but now I'm leaning toward ordering both cream and black, just in case the cream doesn't match.

Thanks. That's simpler than I thought it would be, but now looking at your pictures, I'm having second thoughts about cream. Black sure looks sharp against the maple.

I would like to change out the chrome covers on my Wildkat p90s for cream plastic covers, but it appears to me that the chrome covers are attached by soldering them to the mounting tabs on the pickup. Un-soldering them is no big deal, but how do I attach the new plastic covers? If anyone has done this and can give me some advice, I'd appreciate it.

This piezo phase of my project has me thinking about a total re-wire of my Wildkat. There must be at least a 1/4 mile of wiring in this thing! Last night I played around with different wiring schemes and finally settled on using the master volume pot as a balance control between the piezo and the P90s (at 10, it's all P90, closer to 0, the piezo has priority. Balance between the P90s themselves is still controlled by the 3-way switch and individual volume pots. The Tone pot rules all three. It might be nice to have a separate tone control for the piezo so an onboard preamp is probably needed.

The modding continues... this weekend I added a piezo pickup to pull out even more of the acoustic sounds. The cool thing about the piezos is that they're practically free (I pulled mine out of a smoke alarm buzzer) and you can stick them anywhere in (or even on) the guitar to take advantage of the different tonal qualities of different areas. At first, I stuck it in the slot I had cut under the bridge, but that was way too bright. Sticking it to the underside of the top, itself, sounded great, but picked up too much noise (hand movement, bumps, etc). Eventually I found a sweet underneath the neck pickup, sticking it to the end of the neck. The piezo is wired directly into the jack (no pre-amp) so it's always on, but eventually I'll add a switch- maybe I can replace the master volume pot with a push/pull style like the Epiphone pros.

Thanks. I'm not 100% sure I like the stick-on "E" either. Someday, I'd like to try my hand at making a pearl inlay for the tailpiece.

I can't stop messing with this thing. Over Thanksgiving, I focused on tweaking the Vibrola. First, I took off the spring and flattened it in a vice a wee bit to get a better break angle over the bridge. I also figured out a cheap, easy solution to prevent the string eyes from sitting cockeyed in the slots- just run a bit of thick wire through them: Finally, here's my version of the teaspoon style Vibrola arm- it's literally the handle of a large serving spoon. I call it a mash potato style arm. I think it fits the Wildkat look better than the plastic on the regular arm and it has a more substantial feel. Oh, you'll notice I ditched the roller saddles. They didn't really add that much by way of tuning stability and the knife-edge style just sound better to my ear. I think my next mod is going to be either a brass nut or zero fret to further brighten the tone.

Here's the finished product:

Here's the view of the cut from deep inside... Looking through the pickup opening from the top, you can't see it at all.

I haven't tried it with the amp yet. I'm curious if I'll start getting feedback with the gain at distortion level. As for the ground wire, it's still there inside one of the post holes. I suppose I could just pull it up a little further and solder it to the bottom of the thumbscrew post. I wonder how that's done on actual archtops?

I love the look of my Wildkat, but I've always suspected that the semi-hollow guitars are somewhat of a gimmick- you get the look of an archtop, but because the bridge is mounted to a solid block they really have little to no real acoustic properties. Despite its hollowed body and f-holes, my unplugged Wildkat sounds pretty much the same as my Les Paul. So a few weeks ago I decided to try some experiments- to see if I could make my semi-hollow into more of a semi-solid. As seen in my previous posts, I first replaced the bridge with a modified floating style. My thinking was that at least some of the vibrations from the strings might be transferred to the top over at least a part of the open chambers on each side. I noticed a very slight increase in unplugged volume-- but it still sounded like an unplugged electric solid body. So this weekend, I took things a drastic step further and using an offset saw blade (inserted through the neck pickup opening) I physically separated the top from the block in the area underneath the bridge. Now that made a definite difference- in fact, my wife (who had just put the baby to bed) told me to turn off the amp!

My latest experiment- I removed the stock bridge posts and inserts and modified an archtop bridge to to fit. The wider base extends beyond the solid block and into the hollow areas giving it a slightly more acoustic sound.

For some visual improvement, I'd swap in cream-colored pickup covers, switch tip and poker chip. Then I'd go with gold bell knobs. I think that would really look classy with the turquoise finish.