August 24, 2020
Kubicki Factor Guitar Final
August 24, 2020
I went into the electronics, and reversed the leads on the volume control for a nicer 'sweep'. Then I started troubleshooting a problem with the passive tone control that turned out to be an interaction with the EXP circuit. Long story short, the EXP disables any tone control that is downstream from it. I moved the tone control upstream, and now it works fine. I have a separate review for the EXP tone control, I'm not all that impressed, but I'd say try it yourself, it's not expensive or difficult to install.
I did the actual setup and intonation weeks ago. With a short guitar neck and a steel bar truss rod, there really is no settling-in period needed for this one, but it got it anyway. It plays great. The cheap yellow brass fret wire works fine. It may not hold up as well as nickel-based wire in the long term, but I think you'd have to play it an awful lot to wear it out.
The humbuckers, which are the exact same models I used in the Kubicki bass, sound fine. The series/parallel switch gives a single-coil tone, while still humbucking. The only issue I have is that the tuners are small and closely crowed together, and a little hard to work, especially when you are installing strings and cranking a lot. Once you get it tuned up, no problem, in fact it held perfect tune for a month while I did other things.
All-in-all, I am pretty pleased.
One the bass, I ended up replacing three frets at the high end. I got a little too happy hammering them down, and sprung the ends. That's not that hard to do with a bound neck, as the fret tangs are shortened to fit inside the binding. There's really no way to set the ends back down, so I pulled the frets and replaced them, then refinished the end of the neck. All good now.
I really like both of these models, although this semi-headless design is a lot of work and I don't think I'll ever do another.
