Uni to Ext E9 Conversion

[Jif]

Thanks Ken. Good news on the spare parts, although pity about a classic steel getting demolished

Indeed, the modern MSA's are easy to work on, I haven't needed any spare parts so far apart from rodding which I can get in the UK. Having to work in imperial units rather than metric can be a bit of a pain though, I invested in a full set of imperial allen keys last week and they are making a big difference to speed of work. My first steel was a GFI Student model which was pull-release, I was forced to do some work on it and learned early on that it was useful to be able to do some maintenance. Working on the MSA by comparison is a bit like working on a Rolls Royce compared to a Lada, no offense to Lada owners

Just like to point out to anyone considering doing a changer flush, although it's pretty obvious, that working with lighter fuel presents a fire risk and there are also a certain amount of fumes, so best done in an open area to minimise any risk, also not a good idea to smoke a fag whilst doing it

All the best to you and yours Ken for the festive season, such as it is

I'm off now to continue the conversion

PS The BL712 pup arrived last week, so once I've done the conversion I'll be getting this mounted on a MSA base, can't wait to try it out

[Jif]

Well, that's it all over bar the tweaking. It was a dawdle

I managed to get a working setup between Xmas and New Year and spent some time playing and making adjustments to the rodding as I went along. I was pretty happy with the setup last week and gave the guitar a good clean and polish, along with another lube on the changer. I also cleaned the rollers and roller bar in alcohol, relubed it and put on a new set of Custom Ext E9 Live Steel Strings.

Here's the finished item.

it was a great learning experience, I learned a lot and feel like I know my steel a lot better now. Things I learned,

(1) You can't get everything exactly how you would like it so priorities have to be made on which changes are most important. For me it was in this order, A, B & C pedal, E levers, Other levers, P4, P6. P0 rodding did not interfere with other changes so I was able to get this set up individually. Other aspects of this were how the pedals and levers work together regarding feel, i.e. P0 works best in conjunction with the A pedal and F lever, so getting the feel right between P0 and the A pedal took a lot of experimentation.

(2) It was important to get all changes on an individual pedal or lever to more or less start and finish in sync. This was important for melodic and feel reasons, i.e. on P4 I'm raising string 1 a tone and string 2 a semi-tone and often play both strings at the same time and bend them up, it would sound crap if they didn't sync. Feel wise if one string is starting later than another you feel the 2nd string tension coming in halfway through the pull, so you might think it's the end of the pull whereas it's still got a wee way to go. It feels smoother and more natural if all strings are synced.

(3) Ideally the peg on a rod should be at rest about 3mm short of the changer finger. This cuts down on slack and makes the change instant. The peg should not be hard up against the finger or even worse pulling the finger even slightly in the rest position, if this is the case then more pedal or lever travel may be necessary, or the rod put into a different crank slot or changer hole.

(4) Rods should be going through the changer finger holes at right angles, otherwise the pegs will be at an angle. This is not desirable for a couple of reasons, it is hard to get the peg tuner onto the pegs and I read that it is not good for the changer fingers to be getting pulled at an angle.

I'm sure there are other things I've forgotten, these are the most important things that have stuck in my mind.

[Jif]

So, what happened in between?

First off I forgot to put this up previously, I cleaned all pegs and threaded rod ends in alcohol and then sprayed inside the pegs with a teflon based lube. I did this as I have on occasion had pegs that seem to stick & click right at the critical moment when tuning. I thought that maybe the reason for this was that there are small bits of plastic left in a peg after it's been tapped, or other gunge has got in there. I found that there was small bits of plastic in some and tuning the pegs does seem smoother and more precise now.

The first problem I faced when re-rodding was that it seems the dimensions of the body of my steel is the same as a 10 string but has a 12 string changer in it, so there were no rod channels for strings 1 & 12. The original rodding to these strings was routed through the channels for string 2 & 11 and then bent to get into the fingers for strings 1 & 12. For string 1 there was no other option than follow this as there was no other way. For string 12 I used a couple of redundant shafts as intermediates and used two rods to get there without bending. You can see this in the picture below.

Here's the bends to get into the string 1 finger.

For string 12 I used this method, where I had a rod going from the pedal to an intermediate shaft and then another rod from there to the string 12 finger. I had a couple of redundant shafts that allowed me to do it this way. You can see how the LKR mechanism is in the way of a direct route. For P0 this had another benefit which I'll come to later.

[Jif]

I spent a lot of time getting P0 working to my satisfaction. This takes string 12 down 3 semi-tones, (nice boo-waa ), but the trick with it is using the change in conjunction with the F lever. The idea is that when the F lever is used on it's own it raises the E to F as normal but when P0 is engaged the string goes down 3 to C#, regardless if the F lever is engaged or not. This is achieved by using the split screws to hold the note at C# when P0 is engaged and tuning out the F raise on the lowering peg. To get the F raise to cancel out it required lowering the string down about 5 semitones on the peg, so this required quite a large movement on the pedal and a big pull on the cranks etc.

Complicating this was the fact that P0 also raised string 9 a semi-tone from D to D#, which did not require much of a pull at all. So to get the two changes to work in sync was difficult and took a lot of trial and error. The fact I was using an intermediary shaft on the P0 pull helped with this as I could set the P0 shaft to a shorter pull and then set a larger pull on the crank on the intermediary shaft, so the rod from P0 to string 9 was on a shorter pull for the 1 raise and a larger pull could be got from the intermediary shaft crank for a 5 lower on string 12.

I also wanted P0 not to be a stiff pull and work alongside the A pedal, so I literally spent days getting all aspects of this pedal right. Got there in the end

I had to make a few rods for various additions.

My favourite job, not.

Tapping the peg.

Something I learned from the original pegs was that it is useful to drill the first part of the peg, maybe about 10mm, larger than the rod size, then drill the peg hole below that to a smaller size than the rod. i.e. I was using 3mm rods so I drilled the initial hole 2.5mm to allow tapping and drilled the top 10mm to 3.2mm. The benefit of this is the peg slips onto the rod for about 10mm before it starts on the thread, there is also less threaded peg to turn, so it is smoother. The MSA pegs have to be pretty long as there is a "cage" in front of the changer holes, so having the pegs tapped all the way is a lot of turning before you reach the changer fingers.

Here's a picture of the top of a peg, sorry it's a bit blurred but you can see the jist of it.

The peg bay.

[Jif]

There were a few strings I worked on in more depth to get the feel right over all the pedals and levers. These were mainly strings with multi 2 raises or lowers. String 5-B being a case in point, on this I have the A pedal raising 2, the C pedal raising 2 and P6 raising 2. I tried different rodding combinations until I got this more or less where I wanted it. So the priority was A pedal, C pedal, P6. I wanted to get the C pedal as easy as possible, this was complicated by the addition of a tone drop on string 12 which added to the pressure required to floor the pedal. I increased the pedal travel a bit by adjusting the pedal stop to get it as good as it would get, it's still a bit stiff but I can live with that. I could remove the drop on string 12 but it's a sweet change

So after trying out my original idea for the copedent I decided on a few changes and changed some aspects of it, as follows,

(1) I originally had P4 raising strings 1 & 2 and lowering string 7 a tone to E. I originally had this on P0 on the Uni setup and it gave the big chord over all 12 strings but I mostly used it for the raises on strings 1 & 2. The addition of the D on string 9 which was originally B on the Uni, took away the big chord scenario. The lower on string 7 was causing the pedal to be a bit stiff and I needed the pedal to have a quick action as I often use it then go onto the AB pedals. When this change was on P0 it was easy to get back to AB but in the new position it is a bit harder, so I needed P4 to have a good action to keep the flow. So I removed the string 7 lowering rod and it's working nice now.

(2) I had the C pedal raising string 8 to F# as suggested on the US forum. I couldn't see the point of this in practice though I'm sure there is one, I thought, I already have the F# on string 7. Instead I followed one of Calums suggestions and put a tone lower on string 12 to D. It's a really sweet change in practice.

(3) I found that I had most of the changes that P5 was available to me on a split with the B pedal and LKR, in fact there was only one note difference. So I removed this pedal altogether which simplified things considerably rodding wise. I added a tone lower from LKR to string 11 and this gave me the exact same note as P5 on the split.

[Danny Mitchell]

Some job, Geoff. Well done.
Any chance of knocking up an audio walkthrough of what this 'Noble Setup' sounds like. It would be great to hear these changes you've implemented. Reading about POs and intermediary shafts is quite a boggler to a numbskull like me. Although, I once did have a shaft on the po, in Berlin, in '82, with Mary Hinge as I recall, well, it was the eighties

[Donny Johnston]

Too much for me.

[Jif]

Some job, Geoff. Well done.
Any chance of knocking up an audio walkthrough of what this 'Noble Setup' sounds like. It would be great to hear these changes you've implemented. Reading about POs and intermediary shafts is quite a boggler to a numbskull like me. Although, I once did have a shaft on the po, in Berlin, in '82, with Mary Hinge as I recall, well, it was the eighties

As a lecturer on a college course quite innocently said to a class I was once in regarding the subject of motion - "It's a bit like having a ride at the fairground"

Another of his classics to describe the three e's of design was his description of what a great design the Citreon C6 was - "Another great feature of the C6 was rural farmers could take out the back seat and get a pig in there"

Yep, I'll do a video and hopefully all will become clear. Will take a wee while to do it though.

Too much for me.

Must admit Donny there were times when it all became a bit too much for me too

A video should demonstrate what it does in practice

[Jif]

But ahm no finished yet

So here's the copedent I ended up with,

And here's the rodding chart,

The last thing I worked on was the raise helper springs, TBH I wasn't entirely sure how these worked. I managed to find some info on the US forum and the jist of it was that for strings with tone raises more tension on these was required whereas for strings with mostly lowers a low tension or no spring at all was required. I set them up accordingly and they seem to be working OK. The values are in the copedent chart.

Here's a picture of the helper springs,

Here's the final rodding,

[Jif]

So having finished the setup I took off the old strings and put on the new set. Some of the gauges on the new set were slightly different to the old strings so a few adjustments were necessary, for most of the strings this only required the pegs were either tightened or eased off a bit. Where I hit a problem was on string 6 which was originally a plain string and I never noticed that when I ordered the new strings the default for this string was a wound string. I decided to give it a try to see if I liked it, I knew that I may have to make a few adjustments on this but never expected that they would have to be quite so substantial. I thought that the wound string would require less pull but in practice it required a lot more pull. For semi-tone changes I managed to adjust on the pegs but for tone changes I had to do a bit of re-rodding and increase the travel on LKR. The overall effect on all changes due to this was to make these changes a bit stiffer.

At the moment I'm going to stick with the wound string as it sounds better tonally to my ear but I may go back to a plain string to get a better action.

Here is a chart of the default string gauges on the Live Steel Ext E9 set and what I changed a few of the strings to.

As you can see I increased the gauges on strings 2,3 & 12. I have had bother in the past with string 3 breaking under tension, I read on the US forum that some recommended increasing the gauge of this string, so I had tried that previously and stuck with it as it worked, it also gives a better tone. Strings 2 & 12 I increased to get a better tone, I'd tried this previously and again it seemed to my ears to improve the tone.

The last thing I needed to do was set up a new sweetener template for my Peterson StroboPlus HD tuner. I use the Jeff Newman recommendations and here is the chart I used to map the values.

The final column shows the values I needed to set up in the template. As most of the notes have common values regardless of what octave they're in I could have one size fitz all for most of the notes, the only exception was the open D vs the pedal/lever D's which had different values so I set these up individually by octave.

The way the Peterson tuner works is that the value for the lowest version of a note works for all the same notes in higher octaves unless they are defined specifically, so you have to define the lowest version of the note being used in the template and all notes in higher octaves will have the same values. If you define the notes by octave then the tuner will respond accordingly as with the D's which I defined individually for octaves 2,3 & 4.

Here's a picture of the setup on the Peterson website,

It's important that the tick box labelled "Sweetener should ignore all other chromatic notes and only respond to the notes listed above" is left unticked otherwise the tuner will only respond to the defined octaves, i.e. In the case of the E's only E2 will respond in the tuner and all other E's will be ignored.

So that's pretty much it for now, I'm currently playing the new strings in and letting everything settle down, I may decide after that to do a bit more tweaking, on the other hand I'm enjoying getting the use of it again so any minor tweaks can probably wait. I'll do a demo video at some point and hopefully some of the gobblegook I've been spouting will make sense

I hope this has made interesting reading and maybe help others who want to tackle doing a bit of tinkering. If anyone has any questions or suggestions I'd be happy to hear them.

Happy New Year everyone, hopefully it'll be better than the last one but I'm not holding my breath the way things are going at the moment