D-10 ZB Custom #0330 has made its way to Portland, and I’m loving it! It sounds amazing and plays wonderfully.
Scott Hiestand sold it to me, and it arrived from Connecticut almost in tune. I got it tuned up and played it for a while, then I adjusted the pedal heights. I was tuning the changes when I noticed that RKL, which lowers the D# to D, was returning sharp. So I lubed almost everything up. It still returned sharp. I backed off the return spring significantly, until it returned flat, then tightened it until the lever returned to pitch (thanks, Kevin Hatton, who posted this advice somewhere around page 60). Then I noticed that the D was sharp, so I backed out the tuning bolt at the endplate. I backed it out until it wasn’t touching the endplate, and the D was still sharp. RKL also lowers the C to B on my back neck, and that change was perfectly in tune, so I had a look at the undercarriage. The linkage that connects the lever to the changers has a solid rod on the C6 side, and a tunable rod on the E9 side. I fiddled with the turnbuckle for a while, and got the D in tune. However, then the D# resumed its little trick of returning sharp. I had backed off the return spring just about all the way, so I didn’t want to mess with that anymore. What I did was to adjust the lever return stop so that the D# would be in tune, and my problem was solved!
Then I noticed that my 8th string lower was not returning at all. The return spring was catching on the adjacent 7th string return spring. Since I don’t change the 7th string, I moved that return spring more to the side of the pull bar, instead of directly under it. Voilá! Another thing taken care of.
Later, I discovered that my 6th string lower was not returning unless I subsequently pressed the B pedal. There would be a metallic “click,” and after releasing the B pedal, the string would be at pitch. Okay, start with the easy fix: I lubricated the lowering tuner at the endplate, and it returned silently and easily.
I must say that the process of getting everything in order has taught me so much about the guitar. Fortunately, it has a good setup already—Billy Knowles went through it sometime around 2002, and there are no major issues as a result (it helped that the previous owners obviously knew enough about ZBs to leave well enough alone…). I need to do some work on the 10th string lower; there doesn’t seem to be enough tension on the pull rod to lower the string. Since I’ve never had a lower on the 10th string, I don’t miss it, so I’ll probably leave well enough alone myself until I get some more familiarity with the whole system.
I changed the first string on the C6 neck to an 0.011 and raised it from D to G, because the copedent is old school (5+1), and I wanted a fifth on top inversion. After adjusting the raise tuner slightly, it was perfect. Now I have to learn to play on C6….
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