The White Explorer - The Man Drive's It, The Man Plays It |
![]() ![]() ![]() This build REALLY Started in sometime around 2002-2003 actually. It really started because I was really getting into the Explorer (guitar) at the time because of James Hetfield and Rick Nielsen. I'm not a big Gibson guy, but the Explorer was one of the few guitars of theirs that fit me since day one. One prospective instrument early on in my formative years was a 1984 Gibson Explorer 58' reissue in red with a black pickguard for around $480. My only gripes are, they are all set neck, hardtail, and dual humbucker guitars. Around 2002, I started thinking "let's put a P-90 in the neck position". It's only a bonus that's what my first car...hehe...IS. The Checkerboard Hamer Nielsen had was a Nielsen thing, but white is generic enough a color, and as I'd just started driving, Oxford White is a nice color, so I'll use that. Previously, there have been two other Explorers, Kandilynn which was a hippie sandwhich Hondo body with a Kramer Neck, and MTD which was a plywood Arbor body with a Kramer Focus neck on it. Both of those had whammies. This one is no exception. The "original" final design was in 2004 - which was a Ford themed guitar with a bound top, white paintjob, black/red/black pickguard, and a Seymour Duncan Invader in the bridge, and a Gibson P-90 in the neck. Then I omitted the pickguard, then added it back, changed wirning ideas and vibrato choices. This one is an Arbor body I got at Hot Lixx in 2005, it was originally black + red. The electronics plan changed in 2023 when I decided I'm going to use Infineum Research Sustainer system in this guitar, paired up with a Trem-Setter equipped Floyd Rose w/ EVH D-Tuna installed. The neck will be 100% scratch built by me - a 3 piece maple neck with rosewood board, with the blue oval at the 12th fret, 10 degree headstock tilt, no string tree, R3 locking nut, jumbo frets, and Paul Dean style resonance slots - it will be 24.75" scale, and feature as many frets as I can get away with. I'm going to copy the neck profile from my old Jag-Stang - or maybe combo the Paul Dean's nut-end with the Jag-Stang's upper end. The bridge pickup will be a Duncan Performer Activator, same as the back end of my old red Kramer guitar. Ford Oxford White with Black Hardware.What's Done So Far 11/8/2023 As it currently stands, the guitar body is already prepped and painted. IIRC, I used cheap white spraypaint on it, and then polished it up with rubbing compound/finishing compound. So it looks great. The biggest difficulty I'm having right now, is locating a neck for it. I'm torn between making my own neck, and buying a prefurb chinese neck and modding it. The reason is, because I'm not sure what scale length I want to use, because the bottomless neck slot opens the door to me using ANY kind of neck with it in the 24"-25.5" Scale range. I know I want the traditional flying V headstock, but the only 24" Scale necks have Fender headstocks on them, 24.75" comes with a banana headstock, but a huge chunk of those are for glue-in necks now for some reason, and 25.5" has plenty of necks like I want, but I had intonation issues the last time I used 25.5" on this body....so not sure which I want. The rest is pretty well hashed out. I'm thinking EMG 81 in the bridge, Sustainer system in the neck, and a Floyd Rose Licensed vibrato of some kind with a EVH D-Tuna on it. Machine heads will most likely be Kluson Revolutions since I like those a lot. Update - Neck Finally Ordered - 3/2/2024 ![]() The reason I'm making such a tremendous deal about this is my Jagmaster build. See, I've been doing Scale Length conversions since high school when I converted a Harmony H804 into a 24.75" Scale Gibson-type guitar from a 25.5" scale cheapie student model, using a Harmony Les Paul Copy neck with the heel sawed shorter. When I did the Jagmaster recently, I messed up on some of the measurements and found that part of the reason I had problems with a Floyd Rose and a 24" scale, is that the Floyd Rose has a slightly longer lead-in to the bridge, and a slightly less as wide intonation adjustment compared to a regular Fender Stratocaster bridge. I have been messing around putting an old EMG H and EMG60 in it to see what it looks like. I like the look of double EMG pickups, but I'm thinking I might want to stray from that because I don't want to look too much like James Hetfield, and as much as I could jam TWO 9volts in it (one for EMGs, one for the iSustainer), it'll be REALLY tight. What I'm really tempted to do with this one is another iSUSTAINER, paired with a hot-rail in the neck, and then a "Pursuader" (cheap invader clone) in the bridge, since the best this guitar ever sounded was with teh Floyd Rose II and the Duncan Detonator (that's now in my Kramer) in it.3/22/2023 - Neck is on it's way - other parts So the Neck has been on quite a journey, so I think I'll tell a bit of the story of ordering parts like this from China and how it works. I ordered the neck on 3/2/2023, it was sent from Shenzhen China via China's own version of the Postal Service. You'll be provided with a shipping# usually starting with LR. The order will usually take about 5 business days to process for international shipping, as it goes through various ports of call in China, and then customs, where then it will be put on a plane that will make multiple stops all over the world before landing in the United States. That can take up to two, three weeks in some cases. Once the item is in the United States, in my case, Los Angeles California - it will go through customs, which I'm sure they have to go over it for the Lacey act or whatever. Once it passes through, whcih can take up to two weeks, then it goes to USPS for delivery, and then e-bay won't show the tracking, you'll have to punch in the LR####### tracking number into a search engine or USPS and find out where it is. From there, it depends on what your USPS and the others along the way are like for it to arrive. So yeah, can take up to a month or a little more to get it, but it's worth it. I'd rather pay what I paid than over $100 for a neck.
The biggest connundurm right now, is what electronics. I'm playing with some different ideas on the electronics on this one... P-90/Crusader - this would be a neck position P-90 in the neck, and a Crusader humbucker at the bridge position. The bridge pickup would get tri-mode switching, and the neck position would get a phase switch (maybe push/pull tone). Cheap Dual Active Pickups - - Ie, $35 set of EMG clones (81/85) - ie ZAKK WYLDE type set, and then install those and a Battery box into it. It's tempting, and would give it a smooth look I really like. Sustainer/Hotrail/High Output Humbucker - This is tempting, one volume control, then 4 switches, two for the humbuckers, and two for the sustainer (iSUSTAINER TB-60 or a VEYSZ model to test out). This seems the most inline with my crazy wiring options. 3/24/2024 - Explorer Build is Picking Up Speed ![]() Just like the Warlock, I had to do fret dress on this neck. This one needed it a little more than the Warlock neck did, but it turned out amazing, actually, it feels a lot like my JAg-Stang. It uses an R3 Locking nut, but not nearly as deep as the one I have on hand - needs the more traditional shallow Floyd Rose R3. To get the Scale Length correct, it turns out the neck heel fits PERFECTLY to where the block of the heel starts matches up with where the block of the neck attachment on the body starts. It's 24.75" Scale, consistant all the way across as it should be, and should fit perfectly with a Floyd Rose installed. I ordered the Neckplate within a few days, which should fit the stock Arbor mounting holes, so no swiss-cheesing the neck pocket to screw the neck on. I did have the problem with plywood layer split this time, but I have a fix for this easily done with the neck installed.
I'm still trying to decide whether to do the headstock black or white though. I might do white, I might do black, we'll see. I have white mold-resistant paint that's not gloss, that I could gloss up with some coats of clearcoat over it once the decal is installed.
3/26/2024 - Electronics Coming Together ![]() Typically on a 2 pickup guitar like this, I like to have the tone control only on the neck pickup, and leave the bridge one wide-open with a Tri-Mode switch for the "stratty" tones. So I came up with a wiring diagram. Since I'm testing with a budgeted $100 VEYZ Sustainer pickup (which is also going into a shootout on budget Sustainer Options) - that allows me to put that together as well, so that I can compare how the two Indonesian Sustainer (iSUSTAINER vs VEYZ) manufacturers and how they add up. ![]() This guitar's wiring features a VEYZ Sustainer single coil in the neck, and a GM Hexbucker in the bridge pickup. It features the "Tri-Mode" wiring on the bridge pickup, and the neck pickup has it's own dedicated tone control. More or less, this is to show how the VEYZ sustainer pickups are installed in the guitar. This is different from my Kramer (Where I paired an iSUSTAINER with a budget single coil in the neck), where the Sustainer driver is also a passive single coil pickup as well. The wiring will be similiar to the old "Kandilynn" design from 2001, except it has 3 switches instead of one for phase (Sustainer on/off, Mode selector, and Tri-Mode Humbucker coil-split selector), and that row will come before the tone control. 4/4/2024 - Electronics Are Wired In - Ordered Tuners, Headstock Paint Pending ![]()
I still need to work out, due to the layout, how I'm going to put cavity covers on the back. I got an idea to retain the sustainer board using the cavity cover to latch it in place. ![]() 4/7/2024 - Painting Headstocks, Behr Paints, Rear Cover Plates Waiting for Shipping... So I ordered the Tuners Friday, now will get them this week, but man, took them till Monday to ship. Sometimes I get rather nervous when it does not go out within 3 days, but hey, this is a business, so maybe that means BUSINESS days. Anyway, those are on their way now, and you know what that means.....this one is almost done.
Now we just wait for the tuners to come in, and once those are in, we can string it up for the first time, and start the "debugging" phase of the build process - ie, making sure the electronics work the way we want. I finally did test on the VEYZ and found out it's a 10 Ohm driver, no pickup, so this is a bridge-pickup only guitar....however, after watching some YouTube videos on how Lace Alumitones work...has me wondering if I can use this whole mini Transformer thing to make a really stealth picku eventually. That said, it seems the pickup selector changes some things about the tone of the pickup still...so we shall see. Another idea I've had was to add a single coil to the bottom of the sustainer bobbin sans magnet, and then wire it in like the sustainers WITH a magnet...since there's enough room to do that on this unit....sort of like the double coil Bartolini 3AV pickups like Kurt Cobain had in his Martin D-18E. Might be another installation possibility.4/22/2024 - Finished - Testing, Tweaking, Final Electronics ![]() ![]() I had to re-mill the neck for the locking nut a little bit to get it low enough, since Floyd Rose R3 locking nuts are pretty darned tall. Turns out it fits darn near perfect right off the bat, but I did need to shim it a little bit. Surprisingly, the action was rather low even with the nut a hair too low, so that's a good sign.
One funny thing is the Yinfente neck...apparently China is REALLY stepping up their neck game, massively. I know $1500 Fenders that don't even have a bi-directional Truss Rod! Yes, so the first week I had it playing, I was trying to figure out why the action was still so high...turns out, I had too much up-bow.....and turned the nut the other way (lefty-loosey, righty tighty), flattened out the fretboard, now the action is around 2mm at the 12th fret - only My Hondo Paul Dean II is that low! It also improved the tone massively, and it has a nice bite to it.
The tone control is inactive except on the middle and neck settings, as it was originally intended for a neck pickup, but this had an amazing, but strange unexpected effect - the capacitance allows me to wrangle even MORE sounds out of that one Guitar Madness humbucker, lol. Also, it has some effects on the Sustainer too. Now I'm going to kinda' reiterate a bit about the VEYZ Sustainer unit here - same as my Sustainer Page says. The VEYZ unit is a THREE mode unit like a Sustainiac, except it does not come with a built-in pickup like the Sustainiac Stealh units, or the Fernandez unit. Instead, the clever people at VEYZ decided to make that 3-way selector switch useful for something - Mixed Mode is where the neck pickup connects. On their pickup/driver combos, the neck pickup and driver modes are switched in/out by the power/sustainer on/off switch. On the driver only version, the neck pickup feed (purple wire) is still needed to enable the "Mixed Mode". So on the bridge pickup alone, you get the fundimental and harmonic modes, and then mixed mode is the neck pickup selection. On this guitar, this setup works especially well, because the muffled/capacitance added by the sustainer and the tone control really causes some cool stuff to happen. Synthy square wave tones even....on the BRIDGE pickup. It even kinda' emulates a neck pickup, which is surprising. Even without the switch on in that setup...it still manages to get a variety of sounds out of that one pickup with my heavy treble bypass and my tone control. Getting the preamp board biased correctly was tricky, as the gain pot has a breakover-point a little under halfway where it starts feeding back heavily, and this is complexified further by the fact that the amp VEYZ gives you is VERY strong, and will start activating strings heavily BEFORE you get to that point, causing you to think it's feeding back badly when it's really your G-string going ballistic. When the G-string is going ballistic...that's about the sweet spot, and then every mode comes massively alive. Another cool thing is the amp adds a bit of a "notch" filter of sorts to the sound, giving it almost that hollow-esque "Paul Dean Tone" I really like - yeah, I set out to build a Floyded out Sustainer Explorer, and now some Dean Machine DNA is seeping in. Well, I'm not complaining that much is for sure. So turning the sustainer on can also be used as a tone alteration as well. Anyway, the next part is some Demos on YouTube and the great Sustainer comparison between the VEYZ in thsi guitar and the iSUSTAINER in my Kramer Focus 3000. |