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Amp safety. Keeping from getting shocked.

I'm kind of new to this and I have an old transistor radio that I converted to an amp. The only thing I did was disconnect the radio input on the volume pot and connect my guitar input at that point. It works good and sounds good. I use it with my homemade diddley bow and an old Lotus strat that I have. My only problem with it has been that every once in a while I will feel a low level shock while paying. It hasnt seemed to be dangerous, but I dont want it to be either.
Could I make some sort of isolation transformer to stop this? This is a 120 volt ac powered radio and not one of the battery powered types.
Also I would love some info about making the radio slightly more guitar amp sounding.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by smojo on June 20, 2013 at 8:50pm

It sounds like you may have a slight fault somewhere so it's worth just checking your wiring. You could also try a voltage reading with a multimeter across the jack you wired it to see if there is a voltage present. I would forget the transformer idea but as a general precaution against stray voltages getting out to your guitar, try fitting a capacitor in series (in line) with your "hot" - inner wire of the output jack. 0.1mfd ceramic maybe to isolate any dc element

Permalink Reply by cigarBGuitarEfx on July 30, 2013 at 11:07am

I figured it out. The amp just needs a grounded plug. Any future conversions that I do will get this as step one.

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