Jan 19, 2010 11:47 AM
Smallest space for a transplant
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I think I know the asnswer to this question, so it may sound a bit daft asking it, but here goes. Looking at all the bits needed for a transplant in a photo on this forum, I guess you need at a miniumum an electric guitar body. I have just bought a Soloette travel guitar, but the actual body mass is probably one third of a normal electric. Here's hoping someone proves me wrong.
no way your gonna get the variax electronics into one of those. you need minimum a body the size of an sg minimum in my opinion.
I won't say it's impossible, because I'm making something a bit like this, but it's better to start from scratch than try to modify your SoloEtte.
You'll either have to add a pod to house the circuit board, or seriously undermine the strength of the neck by putting a big pocket in there.
Plus the switches/pots will be competing for space with the PCB.
theres not just the boards to add but also the wiring and the output plugs and there wiring . i wouldnt attempt it on that tiny little body. but who knows . looks like to me it would be crowded like one of those little cars at the circus with all those people coming out of it . but then again they do get all those people in that little car..... or do they.
It's what I thought, but since I haven't seen the insides of a Variax, I just wanted to be sure.
Thanks!
just so you can see whats inside a variax i attatched some photos for you the bridge has been altered with graph tech pickups the board is original. these dont show all the wire connectors in between all this stuff. like i said its crowded in there.
Love the way those pics zoom in and out. Thanks very much amx. Yeah, it looks like I might need a truck to cart that lot around.
Not necessarily a truck... but a bit more than a Smart, which is what you've got.
If you start with 700 electronics instead of 300 (depicted above) the controls are all individual and 2 can fit where your present ones are now. You also don't need most of the output jack arrangment depicted.
But by the time you've found space for the model/selector switch and the 5 way switch, there's not much space left for the main PCB. hence you'd need to thicken your guitar significantly. A dense arrangement of all the guts of my Variax 700 (except bridge) completely consumes a volume of 150mm x 75mm x 32mm (6" x 3" x 1.3"). Does that fully answer the question?
Yeah, I can see from the pics above that the odds are stacked against me, but thanks anyway. It was just a wild swing in the dark.
You could look into fitting the Vax components into a external box that could sit on your belt/guitar strap. I did something similar last year out of curiosity and got a set of 300 components to fit in a small tupperware box, then extended the wiring from the piezo's to suit.
My idea was to have one external Vax and then extend the piezo wires from the bridge of any guitar to a Neutrik RJ45 jack. Then I could use CAT 5/6 to connect the guitar to the external Vax. I finished the protoyype as a proof of concept but never went further into implementing this as I realised I would never used a large number of guitars unless I shot to rock superstardom (unlikely). I ended just transplanting 2 guitars and I've used them ever since.
There was talk on my threads around the time about what your would need to do to minimise RF interference etc and ensure that the right signal level from the bridge reached the motherboard. If I remember rightly an idea discussed would be to change the impedance of the signal from the piezo bridge as it travels the extra distance needed to get to the electronics then to convert it back as it reached the Vax Mobo. This went a bit over my head and I never started working to understand it for the reason above. I tested the idea without any extra electronics to compensate for the extra distance with about 3 or 4 feet of CAT6 cable and short of a little extra background noise, it seemed to work. If you want to Vax enable your guitar at all costs, this might be a way forward for you?
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