T-10 9 pedal needs some help

[Steve W]

I have new guitar arrving this week. I guess I have a thing for Millers and I couldn't pass up on this triple neck guitar. I tried to post a picture but couldn't get that to work for some reason. It's an early 60's pull release with a 23 inch scale, no roller nuts, wood necks, single coil pickups. It has a crazy aftermarket paint job of electric muticolored blue fleck paint. I want to pull it apart and refinish it and get the best sound out of it that I can. The previous owner said that the tone is not that great. I have two Millers and I know they can sound good.

This thing is missing almost all of it's original screws, it's been painted, it's missing some of the support hardware between the necks.
The question: How can I milk all of the tone possible out of a guitar. After I strip the paint, when I put it back together, how tight should everything be? How much torque is too much as far as damping vibrations?
The changer mounts through the guitar and is bolted underneath with two small washers. It seems like increasing the area covered by those washers might help to transfer the string vibration to the body and back.
I'm thinking the thick paint isn't helping much.
In general I thought that this triple neck would be a good platform to experiment with ways to change tone in ways other than pickups and later to try some different pickup sounds.

I'll try to post a picture later, it's a bit shocking in the fleck paint!

[bobby burns]

That sounds like a pretty cool guitar. I look forward to seeing some pictures.

[Bent]

Steve, Maybe the reason your pic wouldn't upload is because it was too big. Make sure it's no bigger than 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high

[Allan]

Steve, if you just can't get the pics up, email them to me and I will post them for you in the morning. If Bent is right and they are too big I can re-size them at the same time.

Regards, Allan.....

[Steve W]

Here it is. I hope.

[Steve W]

Another, sorry for the copies....

[Steve W]

underside

[Allan]

I am sure that there are many on here who know better than me but first thoughts suggest that with a top deck that big you should bolt/screw/glue (what ever it uses) the thing tightly together. I am thinking that possibly cabinet drop would be more important than tone at that stage of the work. Your idea regarding increasing the washer area sounds good. You can go for tone/sustain in other ways but, to me anyhow, tone at the expense of tuning is a non starter.

It is interesting to see that you are considering the paint job as a vibration killer. I have wondered about that in my own stuff too.

Thanks for posting the pictures, that is a fascinating project. Please do keep us all up on what is happening as you go along.

By the way, do you have any idea what the tunings were supposed to be when it was new? And the copedents?

Regards, Allan.....

[Bill Ladd]

Those sure do look a lot like Bigsby fretboards to me.

[Steve W]

I think that the neck closest the the body is the E9 neck. Three pedals set up like a normal A B C. The Middle neck looks like C6th or A6th or whatever 6th with the normal P4 P5 P6 and P7. The outside neck has only two fingers on the 2nd and fourth strings. I'm not sure what that is.

I think that without those long supports between necks the cabinet drop could be pretty bad. If they don't show up with the guitar I'll have to make them. Marty Smith said that he is able to cast a new keyhead for the one that is missing.

I was thinking the paint was bad in two ways. It could be so thick that the keyheads and endplates aren't attached to the wood so well as if they have a rubber washer. The other could be overall vibrations in all of the wood. The only other T-10 Miller i have seen was unpainted and it was all one species of wood without inlays. Kind of Bigsby looking....kind of. Notice the fretboards are bigsby copies. The enplates wrap into the front apron like a bigsby too. I expect the necks to be originally painted white but they also could be the same wood as the guitar. One picture of the underside makes me think the front apron could be birds' eye maple.