nuke

For grins and experiments, I bought a set of FEOR humbuckers. Including shipping and California sales tax, they were under $15. They shipped straight from China, in less than a week. They have alnico-V magnets, 4-conductor cables, uncovered coils, short-leg type, (mounts in almost anything) and come with screws and springs. That's about $7 each, for humbuckers with hardware, and shipping. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with them. Not the best ones I've ever heard, but they're made more or less like any other garden-variety humbucker out there. How can they be so cheap? I have no idea. I'd pay more than that for the spool of wire and magnets, much less everything else. Getting back to the guitars, wood, and so on. Yup, China is absolutely capable of building great stuff. Many of the Eastman instruments are quite good. I have an Eastman mandolin, about $700 for an A-style with a case. That's pretty cheap for a perfectly well-functioning mandolin with no particular shortcomings. Go look at Thomann's website and price the Harley Benton. A full-on, set neck, carve-top LP style guitar is $115 (exclusive of shipping). No case nor bag, but heck, that's very cheap.

I think they could have done better than rock-bottom. The Eastman SB55/v is made in China but it is a phenomenally good iteration of the Les Paul Jr. It has top quality hardware (Faber) and electronics (Lollar), as well as a light weight Okoume body and a nice hard case. $1359 brand new, maybe even a bit less if you shop around. Nothing about it is low quality. Every bit of it is good quality parts, and they play darn nice too.

The first place you'll find penny-pinching is in the electronics. That will level-set for you the rest of the build quality. Everything in that photo was bottom of the line, even in China. One of the biggest cost adders in guitars is wood. And yes, China and Indonesian manufacturers can buy wood from all the same places American companies can, even from the USA. Letting wood sit and cure and stabilize for long periods of time, ties up lots of money, for a long time, which greatly increases the cost of the wood. You either pay interest on that inventory, or you have opportunity cost. But aging wood under temperature and humidity controls for a long time (months or years), increases its quality and stability, which in turn produces better instruments. If you're churning out bottom dollar guitars, you're darn sure not going to let wood sit any longer than the absolute minimum to get it to the sawmill. I've been to the Martin factory, most of the videos of the factory tours gloss over the wood warehouse and the rough-sawing operation. They have an enormous amount of valuable wood, carefully stacked and stored, in a huge, temperature and humidity controlled warehouse. The raw wood ages for a long time before it is sawn and made into instruments. That's an enormous pile of money, just sitting there. Most cheaper guitars are not only made of less expensive species and lower grades of wood, the lumber hasn't aged for long. CNC machines today can churn out identical copies of stuff at mass scale, and there's lots of those in China. But wood is not like metal or plastic, it is organic and it moves with age, temperature and humidity. It might have been perfectly shaped out of the CNC line, but will it be by the time it gets built? You'll also never see nitro finishes on cheap guitars, because that too, takes time. It can take weeks to complete a nitro finish, where as poly can be done in as little as a few hours. The electronics are tip of the iceberg indicators of what you have.

Absolute crap electronics. Even for imported instruments. Total garbage. You will find better quality in MIM Fender, PRS-SE, Epiphone and many others. Money better spent on a Harley Benton.

I've always been very fond of the H140, ever since I played one when they first came out in the 1980's. I remember picking it and going, "whoa, now that's COOL". I've never owned one, but man, I've played a few and always really liked them.

Actually, I think it just runs down the brand. Nothing wrong with buying a budget guitar made overseas. But some things should be true to the name, and I can't think of a brand that actually means true, than "The Heritage",.

Have to consider that Schaller made a LOT of pickups!!! Many, many different variants, everything from floating bar pickups for jazz boxes, to PAF types to wildly overwound ceramic magnets with hex-poles and blades to some very unusual types used in the Fender Master series guitars of the early 1980's, The Esprit, Flame and D'Aquisto all made in Japan and overseen by D'Aquisto. The Esprit is most associated with Robben Ford. These were expensively made humbuckers, with a unique 3-point mounting system, nickel-silver baseplates and plastic covers with radiused tops and pole-pieces. Having had a bunch of them apart, Schaller made a good quality pickup. Competently manufactured and very consistent.

The Faber TP-59 slips right on and is spaced at 82.55 mm. The zinc stop bar was 78 grams, the Faber 28 grams, a net reduction of 50 grams or 1-3/4 oz.

Yeah, I bought this from Buffalo Brothers, who were a big Heritage dealer back then. They told me they sold it new and it was a special run they ordered n that configuration, and took it back in trade from their original customer. You never know about the veracity of such statements, but it all looks legit. The stud spacing confirms to me that it never had the usual Schaller roller bridge/top-loader hardware on it. The studs are metric thread.

Well, that's a possible hack. I could squeeze it on there, but that's not natural to be that tight. But it turns out after some research, that not all stopbars are the same size... Hmm. The most common size is 82mm between studs, which was also the same as the Schaller top-loader that Heritage used. Schaller today, offers a stopbar tailpiece with 81mm between studs, smaller than most and Imperial (5/16") studs. The historic Gibson size is 3.25", or 82.55mm, almost exactly. I haven't found any 83mm spaced stop bars, but wouldn't be surprised. Was told when I bought this 1998 H150, that it was factory equipped as I got it. And I think that's true. It appears Heritage were sourcing the same zinc stopbars that Gibson used on historic re-issues in the 1990's. I was told it was a dealer order run of H150's, which normally in that time frame, had the Schaller hardware and pickups. But these were built with SD-59 pickups and tune-o-matic bridges (Nashville type) and 3.25" spaced stobbars as mine has. I think maybe they rounded it up to 83mm for some reason. Turns out, Faber stop bars are 3.25" between studs (82.55mm) and I have one coming to try out. I think it will fit just fine. Also, it seems there are different thickness of the mounting ears in stopbars as well. The Gotoh aluminum bar seems really happy on the 2001 H535, it's shiny as is all the hardware on the H535 as i got it. I've played the living heck out of my H150 all these years, and it was well played when I bought it used. So all the relic'ing was done the natural way. I ordered an aged nickel Faber bar. Learn new stuff all the time. Gotoh GE101A with drawings: https://g-gotoh.com/product/ge101a/?lang=en Schaller stop bar: https://schaller.info/en/stop-tailpiece/1205 Faber TP-59: https://faberusa.com/product/3010-2-aged-nickel-tp-59-tailpiece/ TonePros T1ZA: https://tonepros.com/product/t1za/

I've had a 1998 H150 for a bit over 20 years. It was factory equipped with Duncan 59's, and a standard tune-o-matic tailpiece and bridge (Nashville style bridge made in Germany). The tailpiece has no branding on it. The puzzle is the stud spacing on the stop bar is the puzzle. I've very, very carefully measured the spacing and it is 83mm not 82mm, not 82.5mm. The threads are the standard metric threads. I compared it to a recently acquired H535, made in 2001, which came with the Schaller roller bridge and top-loader tailpiece. It measures at 82mm stud spacing, same threads. I put a Gotoh aluminum stop bar on it, and fit perfect. The reason I had the Gotoh aluminum bar on hand was that I tried to put it on the H150 a few years ago, and it was a very, very tight fit. So I just set it aside and went back to the zinc (Zamak) stop bar it came with. Just for grins, I tried the Schaller top-loader from the 2001 H535 on the H150 and same deal, very tight fit. The studs threaded right in, but the top-loader didn't want to slide on all the way, just too tight. I just measured a Custom Shop Gibson R0 (1960 re-issue) with "vintage correct" everything on it, including a 1950's spec aluminum stop bar. It's imperial (inch) based, but measures 82.45mm stud spacing. So that's kind of puzzling. I'm not sure who made the stopbar on my H150, but I was told it was factory equipment at the time (Buffalo Brothers sold it new originally, and to me as used). I feel confident that is true. The stop bar it came with, fits perfectly. So the spacing seems quite intentional and what Heritage intended to do on that H150. I sort of wanted to try an aluminum stop bar, but not sure where to get one that might fit. I suspect a "vintage correct 3.25-inch" might fit it. Anyone know the history of this, or seen the same?

I recently acquired a 2001 H535 with the HRW pickups in it. I was around then the HRW was introduced and it was the bee's knees, and nowdays not so much. I have test equipment, and I can actually measure and compare the magnetic properties and electrical properties of pickups, plot their overall response curves and characterize them objectively. The coil resistance really doesn't tell us anything about the pickup's performance. It has very little to do with the sound they make. Wht is important is the inductance and the loaded resonant frequency of the pickup. After comparing the properties I measured of the HRW's I have with many other pickups, I will say they are very close to the Seymour Duncan SH-2 Jazz pickup set. The inductance and capacitance of the coils, the magnetic field strengths and resonant frequency are very close, right around 5% within the same measurements. The magnet fields are a bit stronger on the HRW, but not all that much. Within the range of normal variance for pickups. The other part of the HRW package is the potentiometer values, the HRW's use 500k volume and 250k tone pots, with the same .022 capacitors that Heritage normally used. My friend has a 335 with a SH-2 Jazz neck and SH-4 (JB) bridge pickup, and the Jazz and HRW neck is quite similar sounding and output is right in the ballpark.

Car detailers will put the ozone generator in the smoky car, close it up tight, turn it on, leave it on overnight, or even the whole weekend. Rumor that it works on cars that may have had a deceased person in them as well. Ozone won't hurt most materials, but it may degrade certain foam rubbers.

Ask a car detailer about ozone treatment. They usually offer it as a service to get smells out of cars. Wipe the guitar down with pure naphtha first several times with clean cloth and clean naphtha each time. Then ozone it. Ammonia based cleaners like Glass Plus really cut through tobacco goo, but aren’t safe for many guitar finishes. But ok on plastics and plated metals. A semi-hollow will be hard to clean the inside, hence ozone treatment is the best option. The case will be more difficult to deodorize. All the soft materials absorb odors. Fairly easy to replace though.