Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Shawn on March 2, 2010 at 12:18pm

First welcome to the addiction on with your? you need 500k pots for humbuckers 250k will work but makes the humbuckers sound bad.

2nd you need to make the ground to the strings. The bridge is used since it touches the strings. Grounding to the cigar box will not make a ground unless it's made out of metal. You will not get zapped but your ears will hear a nasty buzz since the loop is not finished. Hope this helps

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Permalink Reply by Michael Gajeski on March 2, 2010 at 12:21pm

I've done several wiring jobs with out grounding to the bridge. just consider the sleeve on the the output as the ground.

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Permalink Reply by Roger Martin on March 2, 2010 at 1:08pm

Not being any sort of expert on gitarrrrr lectrics it still occurs to me that it might work if you dont want to ground to bridge,that you could ground to your tailpiece instead?

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Permalink Reply by Wes "I'm Baaaaack" Yates on March 2, 2010 at 1:46pm

250k ohm pots not 250W pots. 250W would be about 2.2 amperes@ 110 Volts. That might kill ya. Electric guitar pickups, especially piezos, don't produce enough electricity to light an bad idea.

Ground your stuff to the sleeve (not the tip but the shaft) terminal of your jack. This in most all cases is listed as (-). You should be good then.

-WY

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Call on March 2, 2010 at 2:16pm

Yup, get yourself some 500K pots! Next, I agree that you need to ground the strings, but it might be worth a try getting some sheilding tape and trying to ground on that. But not too sure if that will work!

Shawn said:

You need 500k pots for humbuckers 250k will work but makes the humbuckers sound bad.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Werner on March 3, 2010 at 5:23am

I inspected the innards of the cheap "Squier" strat I'm using for my electric project when I took it apart. The pickup cavity was heavily shielded both with foil applied to the plastic cover and heavy metallic paint in the cavity itself. The only ground was to the receptacle for the 1/4" jack.
I believe the shielding on this instrument was due to the straight-wound (non-humbucking) pickups to reduce buzz from outside sources. I would think the ground to the jack (and then through the cable to the amp and finally the ground wire on the power source) would be sufficient....
But I'm gonna review the wiring diagrams before I start soldering!

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Permalink Reply by Mike Willmouth on March 4, 2010 at 2:54am

I use a piece of copper and install it under the tail piece where the strings go through the holes. I run a ground wire to the copper plate.

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Permalink Reply by MichaelS Country Boy Guitars on March 4, 2010 at 3:50am

Nice trick Mike, solves 2 problems with one devise. Ground plate and string retainer. Nice, I will use this trick ( I use wood bridges so no ground there). By the way, I have 2 of those box's I plan to build one label side up and one label side down to see if there is much sound difference. Mine both have pressboard tops and plywood bottoms.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Willmouth on March 4, 2010 at 9:48am

I got the copper plate at Hobby Lobby.
Mike Willmouth said:

I use a piece of copper and install it under the tail piece where the strings go through the holes. I run a ground wire to the copper plate.

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Permalink Reply by Jeff on March 4, 2010 at 10:00am

Thanks so much for the replies guys. I had thought that maybe grounding to the jack might work, thanks for the verification. I think I'm going to try Mike's way on this one though, looks really slick too! And yeah, it's definitely an addictive hobby that's for sure, I could tell when I was working on this first one last night and I was already thinking up ideas for another.

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