Some Hipshot bender and Will Ray model thoughts

[NickHorne]

1: Cork “cushion” block on the actuator arm.
An unexpected early discovery was of a prominent “clunk” when letting the bender back down to pitch. The screw adjuster for the upper pitch limit was as good as silent, but the cork block on the actuator arm, intended to silence its landing on the baseplate when you let the pitch back down, was only managing to reduce a clank to a clunk. It got transmitted through the body, and possibly the strings, and could be heard through the pickups. Possibly stage-ready, but definitely not for studio…
My very simple fix for this is still working fine, over six years later. I simply stuck a self-adhesive felt disc onto the baseplate, next to where the cork block landed, so that the metal of the actuator arm (just next to the cork) landed on the felt. The cork no longer landed on anything, just missing the felt by 3-5 mm or so, and stopped in the air just above the metal of the baseplate. The travel of the arm was now slightly reduced, but resetting the pitch adjuster screw was a moment’s work. And now there was complete peace and quiet. No thunk. I could use rapid “pre-bend and let-down” phrases with confidence.
Not surprisingly, the felt progressively compressed over the first couple of weeks, and so I was checking the pitch screw regularly to compensate for the increasing travel. But it soon stabilised very well, and for a long time now I rarely have to adjust the screw. (I also believe Hipshots have a sort of “running-in” period, while everything beds in and settles, before the pitch setting will really stay steady). And the compression of the felt hasn’t reduced its ability to absorb shock; the original disc is still working fine after 6 years of virtually daily use. No thunk.
The self-adhesive felt disc that I used is just a kind that’s sold for sticking on the bases of ornaments, ashtrays, clocks etc to avoid scratching furniture, or lids of boxes, desks etc for quiet closing. It is around ½” (12mm) diameter and 1/16” (1.5mm) thick. I think there are two kinds of felt, one really hard and the other a little softer. Mine’s the slightly softer one.
I just stuck the felt disc onto the baseplate under the actuator arm, a couple of mm away from the cork (so the cork wouldn’t land on the felt). I didn’t want the cork landing on the felt, as this would have increased the working angle of the arm unnecessarily. Even now that the felt has compressed with use, the cork still doesn’t touch the baseplate, so the mechanism has stayed quiet.

2: The pitch-adjustment screw.
The next discovery was that the pitch adjuster screw would adjust itself. This was happening before I added the felt disc, so it wasn’t just the felt bedding-in. I also found the feel of the spring was unhelpful in setting it accurately.
The simple fix for this has been to remove the spring, and replace it with a little stack of some small rubber O-rings. I have 4 rings on mine, though your experience may vary; it will be obvious if you need to add / remove rings in order to get the right adjustment range with the screw – if they’re not compressing at all, you need another!
The O-rings I used are 3mm internal diameter x 2mm cross-section, i.e. 7mm outside diameter. Black (Buna-N type) rubber. They are readily found on the internet.
I don’t now remember whether there were any washers originally fitted with the spring, but I have a plain washer between the head of the screw and the first O-ring. This is necessary, and needs to be a plain washer, not a spring or star type etc. You DON’T want a washer between the bottom O-ring and the actuator arm itself.
I sort of gently “screwed” the O-rings onto the adjuster. The rubber gives a good grip on the actuator arm, and the elasticity of the stack provides a firm springiness. I find this modification stays where I put it, much better than the stock spring arrangement did. I think I remember finding a slightly rubbery feel to setting it at first, but either I got used to it quickly, or else it went away - I find it fine to use, and reliable at staying in tune. Same as with the felt disc, I’ve had my original mod parts on for all these years, nothing’s worn out at all yet.

3: The hip-contact bar.
This got caught in my pants, my belt-loops, shirt…. I just wanted it to slide freely on my clothes. My first attempt was to slip a length of metal tubing over the rear part of the bar and tape it on. This worked a bit better, and proved that the free sliding was the important issue. But it was a clumsy fix, and large, and the perceived leverage changed with the part of the bar that I was making contact with at any one time. And so I was still looking for a better idea.

Plus, I wanted to be able to play sitting down if at all possible, preferably without having to reset anything.

It turned out that fixing the first problem was also the answer to the second.

I stuck a pool ball on the end of the bar. Just a small one, around 1 ½” (38mm) diameter.
I drilled a 9mm hole in it, most of the way through but NOT right through. You need to think about how you’re going to hold the ball (NOT in your hand!! I used a “Mole” wrench gently gripping through a bit of inner-tube to protect the ball and hold it). You also need to drill fairly straight and to the right depth. It’s a very good idea to drill in increasing steps, starting with maybe a 3mm bit, then 5, then 7, then the 9. This makes it much easier, removing a little material at a time. You get your hole on target with the little drill, then the others just follow. Your ball-holding arrangement will be less challenged too, if you drill in stages like this. Setting the depth is actually easy: just subtract 3/8” (9mm) from the diameter of your ball, and use that result to measure back from the tips of your drill bits; put a couple of turns of masking tape or PVC tape round the bits there, as a marker, and then you can see when to stop drilling. Drilling slowly and patiently helps keep things straight, and avoids ovalling the hole.
I’m not certain about this, but I think the 9mm hole may have been a very slightly tight to fit on the bar. If so, running the 9mm bit in and out a few times may sort it. The bar is an inch-measured dimension across the flats, but we're talking about across the corners, and it's not any exact figure, inch or metric. 9mm is just extremely close to being right.
I tried it out before glueing it on, just by slipping it onto the bar and securing it with a bit of tape. You may want to do the same; just don’t do it for so long that you wear the 9mm hole out of shape, because that might make the glue joint less secure if / when you decide to glue it. I glued mine on with some very grippy stuff called “Serious Glue”, an Evo-Stik product. Not contact or superglue (these won’t work well), though it’s flexible and rubbery like contact glue, so it doesn’t set brittle. I left it alone overnight to set really well (it’s never come off or come loose).
This has worked really well. The ball’s just big enough not to get caught in clothing or belt-loops. It’s always the ball itself that I’m connecting with, not a variety of different points along the bar, so the leverage is always the same; same force and distance = same pitch change – more relaxing and intuitive.
AND now it lets me play sitting down as well. If I sit the WR Asat on my left leg, with its lower bout between my thighs, Spanish style, it is very stable; in fact, it just sits there without moving if I let go with both hands. This is great for good control. It took surprisingly little time to adapt, though I did have to invest in a stool for my left foot (a pile of books was OK to start off with). In this position, the ball on my bender bar rests on the right half of my abdomen, about an inch above my right thigh and pretty much aligned with the centre-line of the thigh.
And I can control the bender at least as well sitting as I do standing. The Spanish position works well for fingered bends too, and the stability of the position is well worth the short time it took me to adapt to it.
The setup I’ve used for the last few years goes like this: when I put the bar in the clamp of the actuator arm, I set it facing along the back of the guitar (pointing towards the neck) except one increment round towards the bass side, not absolutely straight. I have around 1” of bar showing above the clamp. Your experience may vary, but do try something similar for a while, It certainly ended up working for me.
There was a short period of “act-of-faith” type learning, in order to get the hang of working the bender like this, but it didn’t really take all that long, and it’s absolutely second nature now. I don’t have to reset the bar position or anything, it’s all the same sitting or standing.

3b Bender bar contd
One other little mod I have made to the bender bar is the addition of a small, fuel-line sized “Jubilee” clip, to set the length in the clamp. Once I found the setting I liked, I fitted the clamp around the bar so that now I just slide the bar into the clamp until it stops (the clip meets the underside of the clamp), clamp up, and I’m ready to go without having to look at any marks etc. In other words, it works just like the presettable end-stops that drummers often fit on their bass drum spurs for the same reason.
I did find that a couple of turns of PVC electrician’s tape under the clip helped it to clamp firmly, and I razored off the excess PVC above the clip, so that it was the clip itself that met the clamp, and not the tape.
It may be important to choose the clip’s orientation on the bar carefully, in case it could mark your guitar’s finish (I placed the threaded part of mine facing away from the guitar).

Two last thoughts:
Use Nut Sauce!! Just sparingly, but everywhere that moves, i.e. String Tree, Nut, Saddle, Hole at back of bridge.

Other benders on the Hipshot: my policy, FWIW, is to not use them. There’s a small amount of flex in the structure of the Hipshot (mostly in the axle), and multiple arms seem to inter-react (bend one up, and another one wanders off pitch a little). And I do prefer to do the non-B string bends with fingers. I found the slight flex a little challenging to get used to, and kept wanting a really super-definite stop to the travel; it was a bit easy to bend slightly sharp if I used more force. I now actually set up a tiny bit flat on the adjuster, with moderate bending force, and then that suits for major thirds, which need to be a smidge flat. I just push a very little bit more positively for everything else. I’ve stopped worrying about it and find I can get everything in tune really good these days.

And also (this perhaps may be just for Clarence White lovers?)
Consider a really skimpy G string (hey, who could resist??)
I mean .014 in my case. I always thought this would be wimpy, ridiculous, all that sort of stuff. Well, now I don’t find it so at all, I love it now, and I see why Clarence White used that gauge. The tone is actually good, and the volume balance is better than before too.
Many of us, when we hear about White and the Bender, and then first hear “Nashville West”, can imagine that the whole-tone bends, that happen maybe 70 times or so in the short 3 minutes of it, are done with the bender; not so. These tone (A-B) bends are on the 3rd string, at the second fret. And they’re beautifully in tune. And they sound great. The higher (D-E-D) waggly bends might be the bender, 3rd fret on the B-string, or they might be behind-the-nut bends on the open first string (which he tuned down to D, to give an open-G tuning on the first four strings for this tune), or might have been his Keith peg on the first string….. Anyhow, I’m sold on this gauge for the G. My other gauges aren’t unusually light (10 – 48), but the light G is fine.
Also, that bit about the G-string gives a nice insight into the very opening of the final solo (immediately after the vocal) from the “Untitled” version of “Truckstop Girl”. It’s that G string again, not the Bender (that comes a few moments after). There’s that sound, too! (On the WR, try neck and bridge pups together, with the tone about halfway – quite a nice similarity, and all-around nice country-rock tone)?
“Truckstop” is in a strange pitch, sort of a flat A-flat, but since there’s a piano in there, there must have been some fault. It doesn’t sound slowed-down all the way from an A. More like a real G or A-flat. And I think that record was from before varispeed. And I remember mastering in the 1970s, in a reputable UK studio on a nice-sounding USA-made 2” tape machine, only to find that what we thought were going to be edit sections actually wouldn’t cut, because the tape speed changed so much between the beginning and end of a reel…. And while we’re still with CW, there’s just such a pitch-weird edit on “Untitled”: in the live “Mr Spaceman” take, when the whole thing suddenly sinks in pitch over a bar-line. Must’ve run out of tape on one machine in the truck, and had to cut to the other one mid-song when they got the tapes back home? Ah, nostalgia, for when we didn’t have A440 in a little box at our feet! And when if it sounded good, it was good to go.

[jdavies]

Thanks very much for your suggestions - I can see a lot of effort was put into this and some creative thinking! It may take me a bit of time to try these but its great to benefit from someone else's direct experience.
Viva the G&L forums and the people who come here!

cheers
Jeremy

[JagInTheBag]

I never had as much trouble with my Hip-shot as you describe here, but your fixes are inventive. If I have any of these issues, I know certainly what posting to bookmark. Thanks! ~JagInTheBag

[helle-man]

Wow, Nick. You've really thought about this Hipshot thing, haven't you?

Funny, but I never have a problem with "clanging" on the Hipshot release - except when the cork adhesive gives out and the cork shifts. Then I super glue it down.

As to the lever bar getting caught in my clothing, I've never had that happen probably due to wearing my guitar lower, where the bar is more against the upper side of my right leg.

The thumb screw fine tuning knob: I always put a dab of Lock-Tite on the threads, tune my guitar up to pitch, adjust the thumbscrew on a tuner, then let it set overnight. After that, the thumb screw never gets bumped out of tune again. And if it ever drifts (years later), I just use a pair of pliers and nudge it just a hair.

Nut Sauce: A must for all bender guitars. And not just for the bender string, but all 6 strings at the nut & string trees, and of course the B string saddle.

Good advice, Nick. You might wanna post these on the TDPRI bender forum too.

My 2¢
WR

[NickHorne]

Your loctite must be the best fix.
It was my first thought, but the cupboard was bare, so I tried the O-rings; since they worked fine, I just haven't tried anything else since.

And (I've said this before once or twice) your sig model is a great instrument. That back pickup is just wonderful.
You've created a Swiss Army Knife of really special character, and I could manage happily with nothing else except a Dano for slide.

[louis cyfer]

i usually loctite the saddle height adjutment screws, as those tend to sometimes get loose on one side due to vibration.
i use buzzy's slick honey for lube, far superior and much cheaper than nut sauce.

[NickHorne]

Now, loctite on saddle screws is a great idea; I never thought these would move, but they do, even on my saddle-lock. Thanks!