Also, the past seems to be "sacred" but largely undocumented, and the future seems to be best "protected" by sticking to traditions.
Richard, I think some of the problem is that "failing integrated neck/changer" constructions have been built using "conventional wisdom", which means all anecdotal evidence of their weaknesses is pretty worthless - at least to me, and no facts has so far been presented.
There is plenty of talk about the "one piece of aluminum" and "aluminum tone", something I threw out of the equation while preparing my own.
- I didn't want "aluminum tone", so I "killed it" by laminating unequal pieces of aluminum in an attempt to get closer to the "non contributing, non subtracting" model outside the laboratory. I am reasonably happy with the result.
- I didn't want to deal with detuning caused by temperature induced expansion/contraction in aluminum either, so I minimized the effect by not letting the neck alone control the length/tension of the strings. By accident (or cleverness) I pretty much matched the expansion/contraction of the strings, relying entirely on information from people who knew nothing about steel guitars but all about aluminum and other metal alloys.
To me any and all references to what PSG builders may have experienced in the past is of no significance, as the points they make in no way refer to my construction. Such points is probably useful to traditional builders though, so I'll just ignore what I don't need.
Always some potentially useful ideas found when going through posts and examples, but I won't base anything in my future PSG constructions and modifications entirely on what traditional PSG builders and/or players think, say or do ... I'm not into "building replicas".
