Epiphone Nighthawk Upgrades 

So, a very good customer of mine recently acquired an Epiphone-made reissue of Gibson's classic nighthawk. If you are unfamiliar, think of a single cut SG with a flat maple top, three unique pickups, and a hard tail Strat style bridge. The guitar is a mix of traditions, and this one was so beautifully made that we couldn't help but upgrade all of the electronics and put on a new bone nut. The neck and fretwork were fantastic, so why not? 

As I say, the pickup arrangement is its' own thing. In the neck you will find a firebird pickup. We went with a handwound Lollar, which is a sweet one, cleanly made and lightly wound. The bridge pickup is a slanted humbucker variety, we chose a Duncan '59 version of this. Great saturation and smolder on that pickup. So how about the middle pickup? The customer would like a fifties Stratocaster pickup, which I know would blend well with the other two, so I'm all in. The only snag is that traditional Strat pickup spool is trapezoid shaped on the bottom. This extra space is where the coil wires connect. A Nighthawk single coil is really just half of a humbucker wound heavily, so the rout is elliptical.

It's not unheard of to use these trapezoid style pickups in guitars without pickguards, but it does require routing trapezoid shaped holes (see photo). It being a new guitar, and us a true custom shop, I elected to create a pickup wound to Fender's '57 specs, but in the shape of a Nighthawk single coil. 

Here you can see the two pieces of spool flatwork, and the shiny cover on the bottom. Alnico magnets will be driven through the six holes of the top and then bottom flatwork. A space is made between each piece of flatwork, onto which the coil wire will be wound.

Here is the final coil after winding. See those two silver spots? Those are where the beginning and end of the coil are soldered on. Notice how close they must be to the coil in order to satisfy our size constraint. Don't mind the masking tape, this helps me keep any metal shavings off of the magnetic poles!

Incidentally, the cover was made by shaving the ears off the ends of a standard Strat pickup cover. The height adjustment will happen between the pickup pole pieces, so little holes are drilled in the cover as well as the flatwork. 

Here you can see the little bugger is installed. Great care has to be taken at the design stage to ensure that the pickup's height allows for full adjustability within a reasonable range. There's noting worse than wanting to back off a pickup just a hair, only to have the adjustment bottomed out. Now to install that bridge pickup...

Lastly, a new nut is fashioned from bone. The stock one was soft plastic, as so many are, but a well cut bone nut can last generations. Here it is after initial shaping, ready to have the string slots cut. 

Click the video to hear it in action!

Senegalese Kora

Recently I did some modernization work on a Kora, which is a 21 string banjo harp. This is a magnificent instrument that delivers ethereal tones. Each string is nylon of varying length and thickness, and each is tuned by means of a friction peg tuner, like a violin. Friction tuners are known to be difficult, but in this case because of the tension at play, tuning was really hopeless. 

The customer came initially with the request to have guitar tuners put on, but it wouldn't be possible because of the neck shape. The tuners would have to be all in line, just like the pegs, but with some tension adjustment. After some searching I did find the proper tension tuner made by Grover. 

Here is a progress shot that nicely juxtaposes the sleek look and operation of the new tuners to the rough-hewn paper-wadded nightmare from before.

Here we are all finished! I did fib before, the thickest string did in fact get a mechanical bass tuner. That string is wicked thick!

Listen below to the soothing sounds of (very) amateur Kora playing. Hey, at least it's in tune now.