Emmons DST wood neck bolt on SD-10

Day to Emmons conversion

I swapped bell cranks on A and C pedals and changed LKR to push mechanism (lowering E’s) and LKL to pull (raising E’s). The A pedal now required a longer pull rod on string 10 for which I used 308L stainless welding rod (hole drilled at one end).

C pedal necessitated a longer throw to make the E to F# pull and adjustments were made to allow room for the E levers to have enough freedom of travel on the 4th string pull rod. A problem stabilising the 4th string E to F raise was down to the bellcrank coming loose so I’ve tightened that down and also added loctite to the tuning screw on that rod.

Tuning the changer

After checking the tension strings I tuned the changer to Jeff Newman’s SE9/SP9 Peterson sweeteners and adjusted all the pulls and stops accordingly.

Setup

Fine tuning the setup required adjusting stops, spacers and set collars, taking out some slack on the push rods, adding or changing length of various shock springs to time the travel of raise fingers, and attempting to balance semitone feel stops on 1st string raise and 2nd string lower.

It was decided to keep the 6th string whole tone lower which also acted as the 1st string feel stop (rather than change to 7th string raise). In the end the feel stops are there but a little on the soft side. I added fresh loctite to many of the stop screws including at the changer to enhance tuning stability. I snugged up all the body screws underneath (making sure not to over tighten neck screws which can affect sustain) and tightened the set screws on all the collars and bell cranks.

Height

The height of the guitar has been raised using 1/2 inch collars on the front legs. Accordingly the pedal rods have been lengthened with 1/2”, 3/8" Hex, 10-32 thread standoffs in two cases (one of the rods is longer than the others). There isn’t much if any adjustability so if pedal height needs to be altered either the rods may need to be cut at the thread end or 1/4” standoffs sourced, or possibly both.

Cosmetics

I gave the deck a surface clean and finished with Music Nomad One polish and I cleaned the pad with leather upholstery wipes. I also lightly polished the chrome with Simichrome.

Lubrication

The guitar was well oiled so I didn’t add much extra, just a small drop on cross rod axels and between the rollers.

Springfield RT-10 Twin Neck Pro Deluxe 2

Springfield Guitars were hand-made in Livingston and Greenock, Scotland in the early 1980’s. The pulls were adjusted by balancing the pedal or lever throw with the threaded pullers (similar to the Blanton system which forgoes endplate tuners in favour of tuning nuts on the pullers which simultaneously adjust the distance of the pull rod connection from the body).

This guitar was brought to me covered in disintegrated case-foam, dirt, grease build up and corrosion (the latter affected most of the cross rods and nut rollers but little else). Despite this there was little sign of playing wear. I decided the best way to clean up the mess was disassembly of everything apart from the necks and endplates. I treated all the metal parts with degreaser and naphtha, removing surface corrosion where possible and reassembled with minor copedent changes to the C6th neck and a Day to Emmons conversion on the E9th. One extra pull rod was required with 90 degree bends in each end so I fashioned one from welders rod. Some of the crossrods needed a little help to rotate freely so I carefully sanded behind the axle brackets where necessary.

Having set up the tuning by balancing the pedal or lever throw with the threaded pullers I realised  the pedal bar was slipping but this was resolved with the addition of extra compression olives inside the clutch of the front legs, allowing the pedal bar to be seated snugly between clutch and rubber foot on each side.  I added a small amount of white lithium grease to each leg socket and finally polished the visible metal with Simichrome and the wood with Nomad One.

This was a rewarding guitar to work on with a different rodding system from most, making copedent changes relatively painless. It has a unique bright tone with strong output from the pickups and a resonant solid maple body.