2011 - Repairs! Mosrite Ventures

Hello loyal fan and or fans.
You may recall, that in the last quarter of 2010, I purchased a Mosrite Ventures electric guitar.
The neck was superb and the tone was excellent, but the vibrato was... not quite right.
It took a little while to notice it, but there was definitely something wrong with my expensive guitar.

The vibrato refused to maintain pitch.

One motivating factor in me lusting after a Mosrite (real and it's Japanese clones) was that the vibrato had a reputation for being an excellent piece of engineering. Unfortunately my guitar wasn't displaying the legendary characteristics that I had expected.

At first I thought, maybe it needed a stiffer spring. So I ordered one from Zamm inc.
But that didn't work. The strings would not maintain concert pitch while the arm was at a comfortable height.
After this I tried disassembling the tremolo and applying some lubricant. I also lubricated the string guide as was suggested on http://www.mosriteforum.com. Sadly this didn't have much of an effect.
Then I decided that it would need a professional setup and heavier strings.
But this also was not the cure all that I'd hoped.

I returned to the forum again and followed some advice that maybe I needed to find the tremolo's sweet spot.
This almost worked.

The strings would return to pitch from pressing down on the bar. It did not however, return from a pull up.
I re-lubed and tweaked some more. Again the best I could do was to manually pull it back down to the correct pitch. This is trickier than one might think. Fine in concept though.

I posted my woes on this thread and via a process of elimination I was able to identify the problem and quickly resolve it, with minimum effort.

Unlike the previous tremolos I've worked on, the Mosrite system works on a Needle Bearing pivot.
The rest have either blade or screw pivot points. Eg: Floyd Rose, Fender Synchronised and Teisco's stamped steel screw pivot tremolo.

Apparently the Moseley trem uses a "Torrington B36" needle bearing. Mine has an "Excellent" branded tremolo.
I'm not sure if the B36 will fit. In any case, it turns out that I didn't need to find a replacement. There are two types of needle bearing, Cage and Full Compliment. The bearing in my guitar is the former.

Extraction of the bearing is simple enough, just insert an appropriately sized blunt object into the inside of the bade plate of the tremolo system and the bearing slides out.  You can see that the photos showed that the pivot looked as if it was off centre. Upon closer inspection, gouges could be seen on the pivot. The gouges were inflicted by the pivot being slightly too large for the inside of the bearing.

Rolling the pivot and bearing together between my fingers, I could feel a lot of friction, which was not evident when utilising the vibrato bar. It wasn't continuous friction, more lumpy and inconsistent. One was worse than the other.

A suggestion was made to smooth it out by rolling the pivot inside the bearing with a drill. I tried this by hand an there was a marginal improvement after about 10 minutes. My daughter was sleeping so using a power tool  was out of the question. I decided to try the other suggestion, which was to sand the pivot with 600 grit paper. Luckily I had some on hand from another project.

I spent a couple of minutes sanding each and trying them out inside the bearing.
Once they felt nice and loose, but not so loose that they'd fall out, I decided to reassemble the tremolo and restring the guitar.

Even with one string on, it became obvious things had improved. I proceeded to add the rest of the strings and tune up. Once the stable tuning point was established in regard to spring tension pushing the bar back up, I tested out the upward motion of the bar. To my delight, it returned to pitch!
The rest of the day I played it, left it, came back and played again. The vibrato was fixed.
Not only that, it felt much more free than before. Nice and loose, ready for some crazy pitch wobbles.

My doubts on being able to sort out this problem were unfounded and I am happy to say, the guitar performs much better than expected.

I have it strung with 9-42 at the moment, which feels weird, but it's actually still set up for 11-52.
Which I'll probably return to at a later date.

*A reader requested some images of the the string retainer.
So here they are:

1993/94 - Sovtek Big Muff Pi

Long long ago in a land far far away (660km if you want this definition of far.) I learned to play guitar.
Most of what I knew of FX was what my friends had or was built into school amps.
The guitar store in town had a couple of cheap Arion pedals, but they were just overdrive and distortions.
I think I owned the overdrive for a while, but it was pretty tame so I just relied on the sound of whatever amp I was using at the time.

I was about 14 or 15 when I got into the Smashing Pumpkins (Siamese Dream) and was an avid reader of guitar magazines. In one, I think it was Guitar Player, there was an interview with Billy Corgan where he talked about an EBow(what they hell was an ebow?) and his distortion sound.

The distortion was the Big Muff. What a funny name I thought. I was interested right away. I had to have one. The only problem is that they'd been out of production for years and weren't easy to find. (Remember this was pre-internet and no ebay). Around this time I'd become a regular at a music shop in the larger neighboring city.
When I had nothing better to do I'd just hang out there and more than likely was considered a bit of a pest. In their front counter they had these big army green boxes that looked like they belonged in a cold war bomb shelter. These boxes turned out to be the first incarnation of the rebirth of the Electro Harmonix line (I had no idea at the time). They shipped in wood containers labeled in Cyrillic letters and just oozed cool.

If I remember correctly I purchased the Big Muff at the same time as I bought the JCM800. It took some months to pay off but when I got it home, I played all the time. This was my main distortion for years. Big and fat and dirty. It was all I knew of distortion for a very long time. And it was awesome!

I ended up parting ways with this pedal at the same time as my Classic 50. It was lost to me for all intents and purposes. But.... around 2005 I got it back! My friend that I'd sold them to when I left town, just gave this and the Small Stone phaser back to me.

At the time I was playing synth and a bit of guitar in a band and the return came when I was broke and in need of some FX. Unfortunately the reunion wasn't all that happy. They were a bit broken. As a teenager I thought it was indestructible. This pedal took an absolute battering between shows and rehearsals. We'd all thought we were punk rock and beat the stuffing out of our gear, I was probably the worst though. I managed to shatter the plastic input on the board. This was something I'd forgotten about until the return. Upon opening it up to fix the battery lead, I re-discovered some of my earliest solder work. It wasn't pretty! It was functional though and I vaguely recall fixing it with whatever the local Tandy had in stock, which was a chassis mount open stereo socket. I ended up re-repairing it with something closer to original spec and it works just fine.

Since getting it back I have struggled with the tone. It's a finnicky pedal in regard to the load that it needs to sound good. Humbuckers and high impedance pickups are a no-no. It just doesn't sound any good with it.
My only guitar that sounded ok with it was the Teisco. The Surfcaster and Les Paul just don't sound any good. So the Big Muff has lived in a drawer more often than it has on my pedal board. I pulled it out again the other day to play with my new amp and guitar. Guess what? It sounds great with the Mosrite and the Peavey Delta Blues!

The guitar has the right electrical characteristics and the amp can handle the low end hump!

So there's another pedal dusted off and ready to play

Now there's not much I recall about the purchase of the small stone, I suspect I bought it at the same time as the BMP, or at least so close together as makes no difference.

The Small Stone is pretty famous, makes a nice swoosh and I like it for the very slow LFO. It does have a bit of an issue with a volume drop when engaged. I modded it to stop this, but the mod changed the tonal characteristics, so one day I'll just change it back.

I've actually built one of each of these pedals for friends.

They were both tricky builds in a way, it took a while to get them working well.
The Small stone clone also had the "univibe" mod, nothing at all like the univibe, but allows the shifting of the phase degree by switching some capacitors. It was a bit quiet, so I added a small preamp booster to the input which overdrives the phaser circuit and creates a small stone phase tone with a twist.

I liked the sound quite a bit, and the last I heard, the guy I built it for was pretty happy with it too!



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13/9/2010 - New Guitar Day! Mosrite of California(MIJ) 2000's

I'm sitting here chewing the remains of my burnt dinner to give my first impressions of the guitar I bought a couple weeks back. It turned up at work today and all the strings were relaxed to east tension for travelling.

Unfortunately circumstances had it that I wasn't able to play. It arrived after lunch and the boss was.... in a mood.  Anyway I tried tuning it by ear. It's a noisy office and not particularly loud when unamplified.

Anyway I played a couple of chords before I went home and wondered what I'd bought. I have short, wide finger tips and the neck is nice n' narrow, but I had my concerns that I was going to have trouble with the guitar.  Anyway I trundled it off home and put on some Man or AstroMan? to get  me in the mood.

So... what can I say?

It's a weird guitar.

Very thin neck, in both directions.

The strings are close together and I thought maybe I was in for some trouble. It didn't sound quite right. I played it through my Epiphone Valve Jr Stack(un-modded). Its nice, but doesn't really do the guitar justice.  For reverb I used a Line 6 M13 and a boss SD-1.

Arrival at the office.

First off the SD-1 kills the bottom end and tone out of this guitar so I ditched it from active duty(still in the chain). It's not bad on the Guyatone, but on this guitar it's just not good.  Oddly enough the "Tube Drive" model on the M13 actually sounds good!  The HOG sounded terrible with it, so it's not an all rounder.

After a while of playing I put the guitar down and picked up the Guyatone version. Suddenly it was obvious that the Mosrite felt weird, be cause I din't have to fight the guitar to play it! It also became clear that the Guyatone needs a good setup. It's been a while and feels like piano stings on there. Also accounts for the discomfort in my finger tips! 

I ended up playing the Mosrite for 90 minutes tonight and enjoyed the feel of the neck, though it will take a while to become familiar.  The whammy is responsive and easy to go crazy on, a little too easy... I already broke a string.

2009 - Guyatone LG-127t

I got this bad boy a little after my first child was born, a kind of celebration. I'd wandered into a local guitar shop and saw this upside down melted strat shape on the wall and was instantly enamored. It was but a year from my introduction to and subsequent obsession with Man or Astro Man? Their unusual choices of guitars and other instruments instantly appealed to the science fiction fan in me.

I'd never been interested in surf music, but Man or Astro Man? really opened my eyes to the genre. Unfortunately little else is as good as these guys in my opinion. Every day I'll put on a couple of MOAM songs on the stereo or portable music playing device. Can't get enough. 

The Guyatone guitar is a  strange beastie. It has this really hard wood neck, I've bumped it a lot and there have been no dents and barely a scratch. The body is light and as it turns out made of laminated wood. The pickups are somewhere between a P90 and a Strat single coil in tone, a lot of bit but also the hollow honk.  The vibrato is straight off a Jazzmaster and works quite well, the original arm was gone but the shop gave me a replacement. The replacement was from a Jazzmaster, but was too long for my playing style so I went out and bought a bar from a Strat style tremolo. The neck is narrow and very round, suits my small hands and my sloppy playing style. The action drifts a bit as my palm constantly hits the thumbscrew on the bridge.

I've never heard anything so good ad this guitar plugged into a Vox AC15 with a stack of verb and a little tremolo. Makes my valve jr's seem lame by comparison. I love this guitar and am glad that I bought it, however it did inspire me to an even greater purchase.....