Wow I finally did it, I put an Edge in my '02 RG470SA. And everyone said it couldn't be done! Ha!... or maybe they were right... Just thought I'd let everyone know how it went. (Some of you may want to do this...)
First off I put it in there and lined up the posts and knife edges to see what all I would have to do. I ended up having to
sand (
) off about .5 mm on each side of the cavity to fit it in. I had heard that 70mm was enough, just that you had to hope that the posts were lined up exactly right. Well that may be true sometimes, but I had a teeny weeny chunk of wood protruding on BOTH sides. What I did, because Im so cheap, is wrapped some 220 grit around an old 9 volt battery and used it as a primitive sanding block. I got hundreds of dead ones laying around, figured I might as well use em right?
Took me less than 2 hours, but I did a half ass job!
I put a normal Edge in there, no lo pro, just a normal Edge, and, as those of you who were smart enough to buy an Edge the first time instead of a TRS model know, the fine tuner section is a bit wider at the front than at the back. So really I put a lot of emphasis on the front section of the cavity. And there is an ever so slight taper on both sides. You can NOT see it at all looking at it, but you can tell if you try to move the Edge backwards in the rout, it will get stuck. The cavity DID measure 70 mm wide at the front of the fine tuner rout, now it measures a whopping 71.
Since I only sanded the sides I just refinished the sides in metallic black, and it's not very noticable unless you look under there and see. And I did this with brushes and model paint. But that added a tiny bit of thickness to the side of the rout and the Edge scraped off a bit.. but now if floats freely, the most important thing.
So it fits... And I have it strung up, and everything is a go. I haven't done any detailed intonation checks, and I definitely need to raise teh action on the treble side. And I have a couple of problems...
1. I cant seem to pullup very far. What's happening is the actual tone block is hitting the front of the
spring cavity rout, in the BOTTOM of the guitar. Though I just went and checked a few minutes ago and I think maybe I was exagerrating a bit. I didnt really pay much attention to how many steps I can raise pitch, but I can move it enough. I can get good vibrato with it, and I can pull up as much as I would really need to. But to do some of that insane fluttering, I dont think you have enough travel.
2. This is odd. When I do a full dive, and release, there is something that... moves. It's like hte dive slowly misplaces something that clicks back into place after the dive. I think the bass side knife edge is sliding DOWN the post... Might be the treble side though. As I couldn't actually see anything happening, but it's definitely happening. And if it's the knife edges moving around, then it CANT be good for those knife edges. I can do a pretty deep dive without it happening, but to go all the way, there's no avoiding it. And whats the point of having an Edge if you can't do complete dives?
Now I'm thinking one or both of these may be either completely or somewhat cured by installing Edge posts! I still have teh TRS studs on there because I dont have the bushings for the Edge posts. I have the posts, though. And these posts are a lot thicker than the TRS posts, even at the pivot points. Which Im thinking may help with pull up travel just enough to make cure problem 1 and will hopefully cure problem 2 as well. What do you guys think?
I need to go ahead and buy those bushings and take the drillpress to my axe I suppose.
I was trying to avoid it, but I guess I can't. I dont expect it to hold tune all that well with TRS studs, but I figured if I could do dives well, then I would be satisfied.
So any input? I'm doing all this by intuition, and it's not a smart thing to do. But it's all I had to go by. So anyone have anything you think I should consider? I think I've got most of the work behind me though so...
