Installing an internal gk kit in an Ibanez Premium s970

Started by adamlee011, September 17, 2015, 10:51:21 AM

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adamlee011


I recently installed a gk3 kit in an ibanez s (no easy task) so I decided I'd illustrate the process here for anyone interested. I have no previous woodworking skills to speak of really and have never done anything like this before so it will kind of be a "do's and don'ts" of installing an internal kit. This mod made the guitar 13 pin only as there is nowhere to mount two connectors. It can't be plugged into an amp without a vg99 or other roland gear. As I have 2 of the exact same guitar, and a vg88 & vg99 I don't plan on getting rid of, this isn't a problem for me. There's always the guitar out on the 88 and 99 too if I wanted just the normal pickups straight to an amp or other equipment.


A little background on the guitar and the project:

The Ibanez s premium is essentially a cheaper prestige made in Indonesia. Just as the prestige was origionaly conceived as a higher production number j custom, made in a larger factory by luthiers trained or supervised by j custom luthiers, the premium is made to prestige specs in Indonesia under the training and supervision of prestige or j custom luthiers. Something like that. All I know for sure is that these are amazing instruments and I happen to like the neck profile a little better than I like most of the prestige wizard necks. They're built to the "same specs" apparently but you can have two necks built to the same thickness, width, etc and they can still be a different shape, as I think is the case here. The pickups it came with are ok, vintage sounding, good in their own right, but for me the bridge at least wouldn't cut it. I put illuminators in both positions on one and a crunchlab I happened to get in a trade in the bridge of the one we're about to talk about here. the neck pickup in that is stock. The stock neck pup is satisfactory enough for me in these guitars for the fluety lead sounds you would expect from them. I'm into dream theater and pantera just to name two bands, so the stock bridge pup doesn't have enough power (I am into so many different kinds of music and playing styles but for anything metal you need something that can scream.) The stock bridge pup would be nice for vintage blues rock though in my opinion. The middle single coil is...well who cares, we don't use that in metal right? ha. No it sounds good but has very low output. It blends nicely with the split crunch lab with the toggle in the second position to get that twangy tele sound. In my other s970 that didn't get the Roland treatment, I swapped it out for a fasttrack single spaced double blade style humbucker (something like satch uses in the neck position of the Radius.) That guitar then got a super switch. So already there's no room in that control cavity. getting that switch in even took some outside the box thinking.

I wanted to do this mod because my s premiums have become my favorite guitars and I hate how the external kit ruins the beautiful lines of an instrument. I have an sz and an old rx with external kits that I may convert in the future. I found only one example of this being done to an s body by Larry O'Meara. You can see it on thegearpage and he has a video of it playing Blackbird by THE Beatles with a piano sound on youtube. I have to give much thanks to Larry as I was able to reach him and he was very helpful, answering all my questions about how he managed to do it. There are some differences in that he did it on an older s model when they had 22 frets. Since Ibanez started putting 24 frets on them as with the premiums, they had to redesign the whole thing and as far as I can tell, everything got smaller. The distance between the trem studs and the bridge pickup is smaller. The control cavity also seems to be a little smaller. Everything is just closer together with very little wiggle room. The crunchlab pickup in the bridge position of the project guitar came from a guy who bought it new and never installed it because it isn't f spaced and his guitar has an f spacing at the bridge. The S also has F spacing at the bridge (or what Duncan calls "Trem spacing" I can't tell the difference visually without close inspection and it really doesn't matter sonically. Someone is going to argue that point but look, it sounds great. On a scientific/physics level maybe it makes a difference but in this case, I can't hear it. Also it being a very high output pickup may have some baring but that's an entirely different topic. What IS important about it is that I might not have had room for the gk pickup lead to go through the bridge pickup cavity to get into the hole to the control cavity, had I not ended up with this normal spaced pickup. It might have worked with an f spaced pickup, I may never find out, but it's definitely tight in there and I think this may have been a stroke of luck that this guy had sat on this pickup he didn't want for so long. He didn't know he could have swapped it with dimarzio right away for free once he realized his error. Lucky me.

adamlee011

Ok where to start? As you can see, there is not enough room in front of the bridge without cutting the pickup ring. There are specially machined rings for mounting the gk pickups to similar guitars but I just don't think there's enough room here for those either. Some people have moved the pickup and ring closer to the neck to make room for the gk. Not happening with this one. The pickup cavity is just big enough for the pickup and adjustment screws with the ring riding low right at the edge of the cavity. Also, the ring is super low profile, but still too thick to mount the gk on top of. I had a pair of extra rings so I wasn't too worried about messing up. It cut clean with a simple cutoff wheel on a dremel. I should mention that these were cosmo black rings and I used a green scotch brite pad to take the finish off. I like the brushed aluminum or stainless look and the cosmo black starts to rainbow from oils from your skin anyway, which I can't stand. As you can see, I cut the plastic tabs off the ends of the gk pickup for a cleaner look since I wasn't going to screw it down. I used a double sided tape that is very strong but can be peeled off the guitar without damaging the finish if need be, It's a clear tape that's almost gooey. I removed the wires from the harness at the end of the gk3 lead in order to fish the wire through to the control cavity and then reassembled it according to the instructions in another thread on vguitar forums with the wires for each string in the reversed order for mounting it upside down. Now that I think of it, I actually zipped a bit off of the corner of the base plate of the normal pickup to make more room for the gk pickup wire. The normal pickup wire runs through a hole in that very part of the base plate so that had to be done very carefully.










adamlee011

Replacing the normal 1/4" jack with the 13 pin connector took a lot of careful messing around and stressing out because I was afraid of ruining the guitar in some way or another. The connector is soldered to a board that holds the clips for the 2 harnesses that lead to the mainboard of the gk kit. The whole connector assembly is sort of a rectangular box. I needed to make a cavity for it that would allow it deep enough into the body that the end of the board didn't stick out of the main control cavity of the guitar and prevent the cover plate from going on (It's a good thing the cover plate sits completely on top of the guitar's back rather than flush, or I'd never have gotten all the parts inside.) Also, it has to sit deep enough and at the correct angle for the cable can be plugged into it and, more importantly, to be able to comfortably press the release button on the cable end to unplug it without damaging the thin bit of wood on the top of the cove that the jack sits in on the front of the guitar. Once you have it to where you can plug and unplug it, the clearance for the back cover plate should not be an issue. I routed a big, unclean, nasty, rectangular shape (I'm not good at this) with a dremel and a very small straight router bit. I did this freehand, holding the dremel steady with my second hand on the back of it and just shaved away a little at a time, stopping often to clean away the sawdust and check the shape and depth of my cavity.   ONE THING YOU SHOULD NOT DO IS PLUG THE CABLE INTO THE CONNECTOR THROUGH THE HOLE BEFORE YOU ARE CERTAIN YOU CAN REACH THE RELEASE BUTTON! I made that mistake before I had gotten deep enough and it was very difficult to get the thing disconnected without chipping the top of that cove. In these pictures, I left a bit of the wood that surrounded the original jack housing so the 13 pin connector was going to sit up against that. Maybe an eighth of an inch of wood. the original hole still has to be widened just a little more than it is for the factory jack. Ultimately I did away with all that to get the connector as close to the outside as possible which worked out much better and leaves a comfortable amount of access to the release button on the cable end. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of it after removing the extra wood but I think you'll see in the picture of the jack from the outside, what I mean. I was afraid of going through the guitars top but I didn't come close i routed the hole all the way out to the edge of the cove and made my cavity deep enough for the 13 pin jack to sit flush against that hole. (the epox and pc board you see around the jack was easily painted black with a paint marker. a sharpie works too)






adamlee011

Securing the jack assembly in place to survive years of plugging, playing, and unplugging, is a whole other world of crap. The way Larry said that he did it was to use some sort of metal shims on the sides of the jack and the he screwed some pc board up behind the whole thing to hold it forward. The problem with this is, while it works on his guitar, this one won't have enough wood left to screw anything into on the side by the tone knob. I tried something similar and just jammed little pieces broken off of cedar shims in the sides, just stuffing smaller and smaller slivers in all around the jack until it was really tight, and then to hold it from behind, where he used pc board, I cut some strong but shapeable metal off of an old curtain rod. i screwed it in the one side and the shaped it to where it went straight across the back of the jack mess, and then curved around the tone knob following the outside of the regular control cavity and screwed it in there behind the tone knob. I should add that I don't use the tone knob so it came out and the smaller gk volume went in its place so there's that extra bit of space there. You could get a smaller pot for the regular volume as well. Every bit of space counts in this guitar. I personally didn't change out the main volume pot.

The first image here shows how and where everything sits in the control cavity when it's all done. you can kind of see the shims and chunks of cedar all the way around. This worked but I didn't trust the longevity of it staying secured and I also decided I wanted switches. At first I was going to stick withjust the normal pickup volume and the gk volume, leaving anything else to control pedals and also leaving the front of the guitar looking stock. Then if I ever wanted to put it all back to stock, I could just fill the jack cavity, bore a new hole for the 1/4" jack housing, and that's it. Well I changed my mind. I wanted the switches, I wanted to route out that extra bit of wood to get the jack closer to the outside of the body, and I wanted the jack cemented in there for life no mater how much I plugged and unplugged it, ran around the stage, or wiggled the damn thing around for whatever reason.

So now I've got to think some more.....how can I get this to happen......

I found a product called Abatron Woodepox which works sort of like bondo but when you're done you have...basically...wood. It's supposed to expand and contract with the wood so it doesn't shrink or crack like bondo. Also you can drill it, sand it, screw into it, paint it, stain it, whatever. I haven't worked with Bondo in a while but this woodepox doesn't behave exactly the way I remember bondo or other high strength two part wood fillers I've worked with. It doesn't heat up like some do when the chemical reaction starts. You have a long time to work with it before it starts turning hard. It's like a dry clay or puddy. and I mean dry, like it's not tacky or sticky. This surprised me. I thought I'd put a little on the ears of the jack where the screw holes are and stick it to the wood, then after that set, start filling in the rest. Well that wasn't going to happen so what I did was plug the cable into the jack, pull it like I was taking it out but left it clipped in, and left the guitar face down like that while filling in with the woodepox, occasionally checking the position of the cable and pulling or straightening it until I was finished and could leave it alone to cure. I used very small pieces of epox and stuffed them in where I wanted until it was full and I could press it in with a flat piece of shim or puddy knife. I did this until pressing it in just made it come out somewhere else, as in...it's FULL. Then I left it half the day. Now it's like CEMENTED in there. This stuff worked out really well.






adamlee011

Now for the switches. I bought a momentary on/off/on switch to act as the s1/s2 control buttons. It springs back to the center (off) position after you push it one way or the other. The GK kit instructions recommend an (off)-on-(off) switch. I don't know what they were thinking or if it was a problem of translation but you need on/off/on with off in the center. I took the pots out and put painter's tape over the area so I could draw lines with a straight edge and pencil. I wanted to get them on a line with the center of each pot. As far as their position along that line, I don't remember the measurements but I was trying to keep them far enough apart so that I didn't leave the space between weak. I measured and measured and measured again. And then I measured again. It's difficult to be precise because that area of the top is curved a bit so for me, it was 9 parts measurement and one part eyeballing it. And then I drilled, from the top, very carefully, with a very small bit. Actually I marked the center of where I wanted to drill with a sharp pointed shaft that came in an exacto knife kit. This way the bit wouldn't slide off its mark when I started drilling. I went up one bit size at a time until the switches fit through. I wasn't able to avoid a little marring of the finish around the holes I drilled but that minor and was covered by the washer and nut once the switches were assembled. I drilled in reverse with each bit before drilling forward to sort of prep the finish for the drilling but it still chipped a little. There's a lot of suggestions online if you want to look for ways to avoid hurting the finish if you have to drill through the top of your guitar. Once the holes were drilled, the shafts of both switches weren't long enough to go through the top of the guitar and get the nuts on. JEEZ! so I had to route a mm or two inside to let them sit lower in the control cavity. again, i dug away the wood freehand with the router bit, fearing I would go through to the front. It really didn't take much at all to get the space I needed. I replaced the shielding I cut away with aluminum foil super glued down. I don't know if this was necessary but just in case, I didn't want any grounding issues with the switch housings not touching anything.












adamlee011

So, There you have it. One Roland Ibanez Premium S970. It works and sounds great. Everything functions as expected. On this guitar, because I left the stock neck pickup, the gk is out of phase. The phase has to be set to inverse in the gk settings of the effect unit. The normal pickups could always be wired to be in phase with the gk but the stock humbuckers on these guitars have a hot wire, a coil split wire that can be compared to the black and white tied together on a dimazio, and a bare wire that has the pickup ground AND is soldered to the pickup housing. It's ground and shield so to speak so I didn't want to try flipping the phase of that one. I just installed my dimarzio with reverse polarity to match and set the gk inverse as well. If you're putting all new pickups (which eventually I probably will) You don't have to worry about this. Guitar to midi works well. The hex pickup is farther from the bridge than recommended but it hasn't had any adverse effect. The farthest one is maybe 24mm as opposed to the recommended 20mm. Just set the distances in the gk settings of the unit (vg99, vg88, etc.) One other thing to note is that fitting the wires and mainboard all in the control cavity IS a pain and must be done with care. the connections on the normal 5 way toggle switch have to be watched because the main board or one of the connectors on it are going to rest (press) on the toggle switch housing unless you get creative with the toggle switch. Once I got the wires all situated and pushed the board down about where I wanted it, I slid the cover plate over and just screwed it down. It doesn't sit flush against the guitar on its own with all that junk in there. you have to force the contents of the control cavity down by screwing in the plate. It's just stuffed full in there. So just take care and don't use brute force for anything if you ever attempt something like this.


adamlee011

#6
Oh one last thing. Be careful with the wires coming from the GK3 pickup itself. They suck, to put it plainly. I had a couple come out on me while trying to position the pickup. the double sided tape I used raises the pickup a tiny bit. Enough to take some pressure off those wires but not so much that it brings the pickup too close to the strings. Believe me when I say that you do NOT want to have to solder those wires back in. I had to take the whole pickup apart and the circuit "board" that  those are soldered to is like paper. cleaning the old solder and soldering the wires back in properly was quite possibly the biggest pain in the a$$ of this entire project.

Well, if you've read this far, or any of this for that matter, thanks for your interest. I hope it helps or inspires someone. Please feel free to discuss, ask questions, or post your own gk project guitars (preferably your ibanez victories.)      ;)

Elantric

Thanks for posting

(Must be logged in as a member to view the pics)

adamlee011

Quote from: Elantric on September 19, 2015, 12:43:17 PM
Thanks for posting

(Must be logged in as a member to view the pics)

Thanks for noticing! (if this is of that much interest to someone I hope they're a member. Thanks for the heads up though, I didn't know that. I thought of hosting them from dropbox or something but didn't feel like figuring it out. Maybe I'll get around to it. They are in my dropbox after all.)

Elantric

Dropbox typically blocks embedded pics on forums

Here are instructions for embedding pics
https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=4823.0

Today i use
https://postimages.org/

adamlee011

FYI I've never had a problem doing it with dropbox but you have to have the original public folder, depending on when you signed up for dropbox (or I hear there's a way to get it back if you were late to the party,) make a public link, and then add the [img] tags to it. Took me a few tries to remember but it's all good now. Thanks again.

adamlee011

Quote from: adamlee011 on September 19, 2015, 12:38:19 PM
Oh one last thing. Be careful with the wires coming from the GK3 pickup itself. They suck, to put it plainly. I had a couple come out on me while trying to position the pickup. the double sided tape I used raises the pickup a tiny bit. Enough to take some pressure off those wires but not so much that it brings the pickup too close to the strings. Believe me when I say that you do NOT want to have to solder those wires back in. I had to take the whole pickup apart and the circuit "board" that  those are soldered to is like paper. cleaning the old solder and soldering the wires back in properly was quite possibly the biggest pain in the a$$ of this entire project.

Well, if you've read this far, or any of this for that matter, thanks for your interest. I hope it helps or inspires someone. Please feel free to discuss, ask questions, or post your own gk project guitars (preferably your ibanez victories.)      ;)

An update on this. I later swapped the gk pickup from an external and swapped the cover. Cut a hole in the side for the lead to come out. The external kit must have had the wires soldered to the other side. Coming out of the bottom like that kind of locks you into drilling a hole, which makes sense in many applications, but in my case, I was able to sneak it into the bridge pickup cavity.