marc52874 Posted January 29, 2015 Share Posted January 29, 2015 about 2 months ago I traded for a vetta 2-12 combo(love it)and reading about that stumbled upon the vraiax guitars. I do alot of different tuning and thought a variax guitar would fit the bill.found a nice variax 300 online and bought it. I changed the strings and adjusted the truss-rod and it played great,I was inlove with it.the first practice with it I started to get a weird noise through my amp but it was very low so didnt think to much of it but the noise got progressively worse everytime.I was using the xps to power the guitar and thought it could be that,so I used the batteries to power it and that made it worse.It would make weird thumping noises,change in between tuning,even got stuck on the sitar sound no matter the position.at this point it was unusable and I was like damm I just love this guitar but cant use it like this.one day when it was doing all this I had a 9volt battery so I plugged that in instead of the AA batteries and it all cleared up like magic.I checked the volts of the 6AA batteries and they were good 8.67 volts so it wasent dead batteries,but I was like cool I will just use a 9volt,WRONG.lol it drains the 9volt in about 30 mins or so then the guitar just cuts out.So i needed to figure this all out or this guitar is useless.The first thing I did was take the guitar apart and see if I could see any issues. the case of the electronics was hitting the side of the guitar in 2 spots,I know its only wood but they do have 2 grounds going to the body and a black paint that looks like it could be a conductor.so I lined the inside of the body with gorilla tape.I also noticed that the power wire going to the battery pack was chafed at the connector.while i had it all apart I wanted to see if I could put a rechargeable pack of some kind in there instead of AA batteries.I fly rc planes and helicopter and one of them uses a 2s lipo pack that has a max volts of 8.4v fully charged so I said what the hell Ill give it a try.I soldered in a female jst connector as the battery has a male connector,put it all back together. And to my surprise no more noise at all not a peep,sounds awasome,works perfect,etc and the battery lasts a long time!! I start out a 8.4v and after 5 hours of use,im at 7.6v so I still have lots of time left, you just dont want to run a lipo down too far so I havent tried to see how long I could get.my guess would be at least 6-7hrs. also now the xps works perfect when not using a battery,so what ever I did fixed it.also been using the lipo for a month now and still working great. I also made an adapter so I could still use the factory AA pack if I wanted to. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie_Watt Posted January 29, 2015 Share Posted January 29, 2015 Good work! Only problem with the Lipo pack is that you have to be careful not to run it down too far or it won't ever take a charge again. I too use them in RC planes and choppers. I use NiMh AA cells in my Variax 500 and they work fine. I get decent playing time and I keep a spare pack charged. I never use the power supply. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillBee Posted January 29, 2015 Share Posted January 29, 2015 Excellent stuff guys - filed under stuff to remember! -B Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marc52874 Posted January 29, 2015 Author Share Posted January 29, 2015 im not too worried about running it down too far,after 5 hours of use Im at 7.6v so thats 3.8v per cell and I run my lipos down to 3.6v per cell so I have plenty of room.this lipo is over 10 yrs old and still works perfect and both cells are still even.Plus a new lipo is only 8 dollars on ebay! I could run a volt gauge so I can keep an eye on it real time.that would be cool! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie_Watt Posted January 29, 2015 Share Posted January 29, 2015 What's the mA Hour rating of the Lipo you are using? The AA NiMh cells I use are 2500 and they run about 6 hours or so. The down side is that they self discharge fairly rapidly so if I don't use the guitar for a few weeks, they need charging. I don't use my 500 all that much since I have a JTV69S. I may convert my 500 to LiPo like you did though since I also have some batteries that I don't use much that would fit. The JTV has a Lithium battery but the battery holder has a built in protection circuit that shuts things off before the battery is drained too much. It also has a four LED voltage monitor which shows the state of charge. The old Variax shuts down at some voltage but It may be low enough that you could damage the Lipo. I think it works down to around 7 V. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marc52874 Posted January 29, 2015 Author Share Posted January 29, 2015 im using a 800 Mah with a 30c discharge rate.I was told the variax shuts down at 6v but havent tested that yet. i might put a lipo volt readout on the guitar where I can see it while playing to monitor everything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie_Watt Posted January 29, 2015 Share Posted January 29, 2015 I'm surprised you are getting enough runtime with an 800 MaH battery. I think the electronics draw somethere around 400mA. I would expect to only get about 2 hours at most. I am pretty sure that it craps out somewhere above 6V based on my experience. The electronics run on 5V. There is a linear regulator that drops the battery voltage down to 5V. The JTV battery is 7.4V 2200 MaH. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clay-man Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 That's pretty awesome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marc52874 Posted February 11, 2015 Author Share Posted February 11, 2015 yes I am surprised that I get that much time out of it but it has been working great,I timed it through 2 practices and got 5 1/2 hours out of it and could have pushed it more but dont want to drain the batt. too low. I just played a show on friday and it all worked perfect no noise,no weird stuff happening,dont have to worry about the batt cutting out etc. ever since I did all this the variax has been awasome.people commented on how great my sound is,and cant beleive that the 12 string acoustic sound is coming from this guitar.I play with a guy that has a american strat and in a live setting they sound basicly the same,he says mine sounds better than his.lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dgnyberg Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 Do you have a part number for the battery you used? I'm interested in doing a similar battery mod. It should work for my 700AC, 700Bass and my 300Electric, right? Also, what would be a good charger for this battery pack? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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