I'm desperate...

Re: I'm desperate...

I am not going to argue any longer with you man.
I believe you when you say you don't charge anything like that.
I believe you when you say there are cases where there is no diagram or it's wrong in which case, trial and error is all to go with. On those cases I bet it would help immensely to be you :)

Another part I have to agree is that since the guy isn't here there's not a point in going on about it anymore.
However I resent that I attacked you because I did no such thing, expressing my opinion and thoughts in general is how I'd put it, as for your business practices, you're right, I don't know them, I just said that if they were anything like how you made it sound then I'd probably wouldn't like them. Thats all.

As for the hysterical nature of my response, it's called getting pissed off. However I still think that every part of my arguments and reasoning is valid so let's agree to disagree here, shall we?

About the libellous thing, I didn't know there was an alternate spelling, however in Greek there's only one L so I'm inclined to think that the double LL is the alternate spelling, not the other way around.

And about my English, actually I have a Proficiency from the University of Cambridge certifying that my English is actually better than more than a few native speakers.
However I have found that American English is far more widely used in the net and as such that is the path I choose when writing something online.

You're right about the "due" part though, call it a slip of the tongue if you will. :)
 
Re: I'm desperate...

Right !!!

That's it !

Enough!!!!

This argument stops right here, right now !

Understood ?

Am I making myself clear Gentlemen ?

RIGHT HERE ! - RIGHT NOW !

p.s..... I'll do the soldering job for $80.00.
 
Re: I'm desperate...

octavedoctor said:
Anyway I'm not going to say any more on the matter as I don't want to see this thread hijacked by a discussion on prices.
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Haha, I love "last word" posts like these. You know, you don't HAVE to call people out when you disagree with them...

Anyways, to the OP, though most of us would love that kind of pay for doing what we do, 85 dollars is far too much for a simple pickup swap, especially if you think you'd like to make a little hobby of guitar tinkering (like many who enter this forum do). Start small with tinkering - learn to do one wire at a time, make one SOLID connection at a time, and when you get comfortable with that, move on. Wiring diagrams can be a pain, since there are tons of different ways to wire things. Once you dive in, you'll learn how everything works together.
 
Re: I'm desperate...

Stigmata, hehe, I bet you didn't expect such an... animated... welcome to the forum! Look what you did! :werd:
 
Re: I'm desperate...

alex1fly said:
Anyways, to the OP, though most of us would love that kind of pay for doing what we do,
Click to expand...

Yes, that's my point all along. Everyone is entitled to try to make as much money as they can from what they do. I doubt whether anyone on here, given the opportunity to make $300 (or $3000 even) from doing something very simple would turn it down but as long as you are not deceiving anyone, or coercing them into paying, then you are doing nothing wrong.

If, on the other hand, you quote $15 for something then charge $85 without giving the other party the opportunity to withdraw from the contract then you are in the wrong.

This is why I do not issue quotes for diagnostic work; it can take five days to find the problem and five minutes to fix it and there is often a huge gulf between the customer's perception of the amount of work involved and the reality. I fell out with a customer a few years ago because he had unwisely tried to swap the pickups and pots in his Washburn Idol and his Gibson Les Paul himself because he didn't like the £45 I had quoted him to do the job (this was the guy who had cut the cables of all his pickups to within an inch of the baseplate of each then brought the whole mess to me to sort it out).

The pickup thing was just the tip of the iceberg; he'd wrought a huge amount of damage to his Les Paul through his incompetence and one of the complications was a crack in the track of one of the dual gang pots originally fitted to the Washburn which he'd tried to force fit into the Les Paul against a ramped contour which he'd created by chiselling away at the inside of the control cavity in an attempt to get the shorter threads to fit the Gibson.

I didn't know about this until i finished rewiring the thing and found the Gibson wasn't working as expected. Assuming that I had done something wrong i opted to redo the whole job. Three days, about 15 hours of total bench time (some of which was spent routing the Les Paul freehand to correct the ramped contour which had caused the problem) and several hundred feet of wiring later I spotted the almost invisible hairline crack in the lower paxolin board on one of the pots. A little superglue and graphite paint and the pot was as good as new but my customer was now £150 down because the problem had been caused by him and a huge amount of my time had been wasted correcting the results of his cack-handedness.

A few months later I got a letter from him demanding a refund. He had been hammering hell out of the Les Paul and one of the pickup screws had worked loose (did I mention that he'd stripped the thread in the baseplate of the Duncans that went into the Les Paul so I'd had to do an on the fly repair on that as well?). Instead of bringing it to me to put right under the terms of my warranty he'd taken it to one of my competitors who had immediately tried to score points off me by telling the guy that he had been "grossly overcharged" for "just wiring a few pots".

i have a raft of these stories; like the guy who punched a hole in the rib of his electro-acoustic when he smashed his jack plug into a wall, then complained because I had fixed it by mounting a metal jack plate in the rib to reinforce it (there wasn't enough wood there to do it any other way and rebuilding the rib would have been ridiculously expensive). He said that he hadn't specifically asked me to do it this way, he wasn't expecting it, and the addition of the metal plate was an "additional non-requested item which he should not be obliged to pay for". I was only charging him £15 for the whole job. No doubt he's telling all his friends on some forum somewhere how I ripped him off...
 
Re: I'm desperate...

KeeperOS said:
And about my English, actually I have a Proficiency from the University of Cambridge certifying that my English is actually better than more than a few native speakers.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your comments. Your American English is still better than my Greek... ;)

I have no personal beef with you KeeperOS, honestly, but in the time I have been here (and in the last month actually) I have been insulted and flamed many times simply for holding an opinion that differs from that expressed by someone else posting here, however I avoid stooping to ad hominem attacks and personal vitriol, which prove no point at all. However much you might want to call someone an idiot, you don't; you make your point better with reasoned argument than with unrestrained emotion and I, for one, respond better to this.

I can give as good as I get but I find it offensive when someone comes here and makes derogatory remarks - without any substantiating evidence - about a third party who is not a member of the forum and who can't put up a defence. I am especially defensive of professional technicians as I am one myself and I am aware that there are two sides two every story and I'm particularly sensitive to any suggestion that, just because we have taken the time and effort to develop our skills and knowledge, that we somehow owe it to the rest of humanity to make it freely available just because they place no value on it, and believe me, there are things you get from a professional that you won't get if you do the job yourself. If someone brings me a guitar with a broken wire to the jack a lot of people would just solder the wire back. I want to know why it has broken; is the socket rotating because it hasn't been properly fitted, does it need a shakeproof washer on it, should it have a strain relief boot from heat shrink, would it hold up better and pickup less noise if I replace the wire with screened cable and if I can fix all those things for my minimum charge instead of just soldering the wire back on isn't that better for the customer? But then the customer sees you as having done a lot of extra work that you didn't need to charge them for...

Apart from anything else the internet is still governed by the laws of libel and the forum admins need to be careful of this as they are the ones who will be held responsible for libellous content, not the posters.
 
Re: I'm desperate...

Alright, let's get serious !
Final offer !
I'll do the soldering job for $75.00... PLUS... I'll throw in a FREE input socket washer !
 
Re: I'm desperate...

I always recommend the public library...If you live near a good one they'll have a lot of good books with alot of good info to learn about these things and you'll never pay any turkey $85 for something simple like soldering or switching pickups again....Cheers
 
Re: I'm desperate...

alex1fly said:
Stigmata, hehe, I bet you didn't expect such an... animated... welcome to the forum! Look what you did! :werd:
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Yeah dude, all I wanted to know was how to change a pickup...

I thank all those who helped me, gave me advice, etc. This is an awesome forum.

Anyways... If you're to argue on this post, please argue about pickups, not KISS. :1:
 
Re: I'm desperate...

Hehe, actually I think that you've learned a tad more than you bargained for ;)

Look, regardless of how we crossed words, the man KNOWS his thing, and he's 100% right, both about guitars and the guys who own, play and break them :9:

He has enormous knowledge and has helped countless times in this forum which is why I found his original outburst strange (sorry man, I DID miss the part where this was the last straw in a number of blows you took)

And, to clarify about sth, there are in fact occasions (like the one with the chiseled LP and cracked pot) where fixing a mess will take A LOT more time than the job originally required (wiring the guitar) and it is only fair for the tech to be paid for his time and effort it took.

Something that I do and that I'd advise anyone that would need a tech/luthier to do is to get to know them. I have tried to meet all of the techs in my area, both in a professional and personal level and have chosen the ones (two, one tech, one luthier) that I'd do business with based on both. We are now friends and they get all of my business and respect because I better understand them and the work they do and I'm more than happy to pay them in full for doing a quality work instead of a rip-off patch job (and trust me when I say, there's a truckload of those as well...).


However, I still think that if your guy simply quoted you 85$ without even seeing the guitar then I am 99% certain that he was simply taking advantage of the fact that he was the only one around and thus - you COULDN'T take your business elsewhere.

(Well, something else that I've seen happen on occasion is that maybe he, for whatever reason, didn't want to do your guitar so he just quoted you an outrageous price to drive you away. Not likely but plausible)
 
Re: I'm desperate...

Ok, so I need to update this for further help:

1) I practiced soldering on my friends piece of crap Start-like guitar. I switched its bridge pickup with some old stock pickup. It works (!), it's just that when I turn the volume on and off, it makes very light crackling noises. Any clues as to why?

2) I recieved my SHR-1, and I want it to cancel hum and all that. Is there some sort of special way I have to do to make this happen?

Thanks!
 
Re: I'm desperate...

stigmata_97 said:
Ok, so I need to update this for further help:

1) I practiced soldering on my friends piece of crap Start-like guitar. I switched its bridge pickup with some old stock pickup. It works (!), it's just that when I turn the volume on and off, it makes very light crackling noises. Any clues as to why?
Click to expand...

Some dust on the tracks. Get some switch cleaner spray, squirt it inside the casing port, then spin the pot quickly back and forth until the crackling stops. If it doesn't replace the pot.

stigmata_97 said:
2) I recieved my SHR-1, and I want it to cancel hum and all that. Is there some sort of special way I have to do to make this happen?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

The red and white wires are soldered together. Put some heat shrink tubing over the joint and tape it back to the main body of the cable or strap it back with heat shrink over the lot if you can.

The green wire goes to ground along with the bare wire, the black wire is the signal output.

That is the default configuration, however if the in-between positions sound a bit thin you may have to do some jiggery pokery with the connections as the pickups have a complex relative polarity relationship. Hope that the Ibanez pickups are compatible with the Seymour Duncans as Robert asserts. I've seen a few that aren't...
 
Re: I'm desperate...

KeeperOS said:
(Well, something else that I've seen happen on occasion is that maybe he, for whatever reason, didn't want to do your guitar so he just quoted you an outrageous price to drive you away. Not likely but plausible)
Click to expand...

Er, yes, I confess to have done that myself on occasion. Sometimes you just get a bad vibe about something...

Thank you for your kind words KeeperOS, be assured I have no hard feelings about our little spat, it's all in good fun.

But perhaps I could prevail upon you to lift the curse you have placed on my computer? My translator widget now only displays in Greek script...:31:


 
Re: I'm desperate...

Thanks for the info octavedoctor! I'm almost 100% sure my guitar is capable, so I just gotta go get flux tomorrow, then put this thing in!
 
Re: I'm desperate...

Be careful what flux you buy; it's better to use flux cored solder as many flukes are corrosive and need to be cleaned off afterwards. This isn't practical with delicate electrical connections.
 
Re: I'm desperate...

For what it's worth, I come down somewhere in between. As a winder of pickups, I don't charge much if a local guy wants me to also install the pu's I made. Mostly because it just seems weird to me to charge as much or more than the cost of the pickup itself to install it. If it's a fairly standard/typical wiring layout, it's just not that hard to figure out and doesn't take all that much time. But then I do this only part time and Doc makes his living doing what he does. If I was full-time, the price for both installs and new pickups would probably about double. Time really is money when you don't have the day job. Gotta get a bunch of work out as quickly as you can without screwing up quality.

Where I side with the Doc is on the free market issue. If you can get that much for it, why not? I doubt anyone in here ever turned down a job offer because you felt they were offering you too much money. What's the difference between that and charging $85 for a swap to someone willing to pay it? As Doc says, as long as you're not bait-and-switching or otherwise deceiving the customer, there just isn't a problem there.

I also side with him on avoiding giving quotes on a repair, because you never know what you're getting into. The customer will say the problem is A but not tell you about problems B, C, D, etc., in many cases because he probably isn't aware of these extra problems himself. Luckily for me, with a pickup repair, the worst that can happen is a rewind and maybe a magnet swap so the ceiling on the cost and time is pretty well fixed. Even if bobbins are somehow destroyed, they can be replaced fairly cheaply. But repairing wood is a whole different ball game.

And he's right again about getting a bad vibe from a customer and giving a wild quote just to make them go away. I haven't had much in the way of true wack jobs, but I tend to avoid very young customers because with limited experience with guitars in general (never mind pickups) they don't really know what they want. They get wowed too easily by numbers and ask for specs that won't work at all for the sound they want, and that's assuming they accurately describe the sound they want to begin with. And then they change their minds 50 times about what they want and thus end up not liking what you made.

So I prefer a vet who's tried his share of pu's, knows some basics about how they work and are constructed, and can tell you what he likes and doesn't like about his existing pu's, and generally can give a pretty accurate description of the sound they're looking for. In other words, they know what they want, and to me, within reason, the pickier they are, the better. I don't know how it is with building or repairing guitars, but with winding pickups, a knowledgeable picky customer is the easiest to satisfy.
 
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