~davie Posted January 27, 2007 Report Share Posted January 27, 2007 help! i need some help with shielding my guitar! The noise hasn't improved, its slightly noisier. I've been using the guitarnuts shielding strat guide as reference to shield my guitar. Here are some details, when I touch any metal part it gets a bit quieter. The tone pot apparently doesn't do anything anymore, since there's no alteration in sound when i turn the knob. And I soldered one lead of the capacitor to the tone pot shell, since i tried clamping it to the bottom of the pot and it wasn't any better. Maybe there's something wrong with my "star" ground? or maybe i'm using the wrong terminals on the pots and pickup switch? here are some pics of it. http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u285/dr...69/IMG_2278.jpg http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u285/dr...69/IMG_2280.jpg http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u285/dr...69/IMG_2283.jpg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregP Posted January 27, 2007 Report Share Posted January 27, 2007 You have made all the shielded areas continuous with each other, but you haven't sent it to ground, from what I can tell. I had the exact same symptoms, and after looking at my wiring I realized what was missing. My solution was to solder a wire to the back of a pot (just 'cause it's convenient. You could theoretically solder to the shielding material) and then send it to ground. I used star grounding, so I'm not sure where you would send it to ground. Maybe directly to the ground lug of the output jack? Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~davie Posted January 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 27, 2007 thanks greg for your input. but does that explain why my tone pot isn't responding? and while i do have a "star ground", which is on the right side of the yellow capacitor. The yellow cap is connected between the tone pot shell and the star ground. I'm still kinda confused about all this. Any more suggestions? and btw, i'm a newbie at electronics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MCH Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 (edited) thanks greg for your input. but does that explain why my tone pot isn't responding? and while i do have a "star ground", which is on the right side of the yellow capacitor. The yellow cap is connected between the tone pot shell and the star ground. I'm still kinda confused about all this. Any more suggestions? and btw, i'm a newbie at electronics. I just did a humbucker style in this star grounding (guitarnuts.com) and had failure. I tore it all apart and ended up doing a Seymour Duncan wiring scheme. I also isolated my pots from the shield; by cutting the shielding back so that the shafts do not contact the shield. The only contact with the shield was the output jack (this effectively grounded the shield, plus the output jack ground and the selector switch ground are directly connected). The tone control was a puzzler. Again, the one that worked was the SD wiring style. Even then the tone control seems very minimal, it seemed to be either off or on; no gradual change. I tried other various ways I found on the web and they were worse. On my rewiring I checked for continuity throughout the whole system to make sure all was kosher. When I finally gave it a whirl it was dead quiet. My previous attempt was noisier and only quieted when I touched something metal on the guitar. I find electronics very frustrating. good luck Edited January 28, 2007 by MCH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~davie Posted January 28, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 (edited) thanks greg for your input. but does that explain why my tone pot isn't responding? and while i do have a "star ground", which is on the right side of the yellow capacitor. The yellow cap is connected between the tone pot shell and the star ground. I'm still kinda confused about all this. Any more suggestions? and btw, i'm a newbie at electronics. I just did a humbucker style in this star grounding (guitarnuts.com) and had failure. I tore it all apart and ended up doing a Seymour Duncan wiring scheme. I also isolated my pots from the shield; by cutting the shielding back so that the shafts do not contact the shield. The only contact with the shield was the output jack (this effectively grounded the shield, plus the output jack ground and the selector switch ground are directly connected). The tone control was a puzzler. Again, the one that worked was the SD wiring style. Even then the tone control seems very minimal, it seemed to be either off or on; no gradual change. I tried other various ways I found on the web and they were worse. On my rewiring I checked for continuity throughout the whole system to make sure all was kosher. When I finally gave it a whirl it was dead quiet. My previous attempt was noisier and only quieted when I touched something metal on the guitar. I find electronics very frustrating. good luck hmm. thanks for the insight. could you please post up where i can find this SD wiring scheme? as well as other things i need to do. Thanks and also what should i do with the large capacitor? Edited January 28, 2007 by ~davie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregP Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 I dunno. I wrote a whole explanation in an almost identical thread, but I'm loathe to retype it. Your symptoms are EXACTLY what would happen when the shield is not finding its way to ground. That's all I can say. The pictures unfortunately aren't going to help decipher what's going on very easily. A wiring diagram would be more helpful. I have my suspicions, but a bunch of speculation would probably just get confusing. Nothing wrong with the SD diagrams, but you'll learn more by trouble-shooting your current wiring. When you find out which step you missed, it'll be a nice "eureka!" moment. Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MCH Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 Seymour Duncan wiring diagrams. http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/schematics.shtml Note: I'm not saying the "star ground" wiring system doesn't work as suggested by guitarnuts.com. It didn't work for me. It could have been a bad connection or something I did on my part. But when I re-wired with the SD scheme it worked. So I let sleeping dogs lie. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregP Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 Definitely a valid approach, especially if you're at your wits' end. I used an SD diagram myself, actually both of the most recent times I rewired a guitar. But I *also* used star grounding. I honestly don't fully understand how switches and pots work in terms of which lug does what, so you'll see in my guitars that the lugs themselves are always connected up identically to my source diagram (SD in this case). The modification I make is: 1. Any wires that go to ground (indicated in the diagrams as either "ground" or "solder" on the back of a pot, which is also ground) go to the star and ONLY the star (pots' shells that are connected to each other for ground get removed, vol lug gets desoldered from back of pot), instead. 2. ONE wire goes from the back of a pot (which is electrically continuous with the shielding material) to the star. 3. The jack ground wire goes to the star That's about it. Except for those things, I still followed the SD diagram. Note that I did not do the "big capacitor" mod. I'm not sure if that factors into anything, but it's worth mentioning. Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregP Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 Just did this quick mockup of my "star grounded" version. Different electronics, but you should be able to see the idea. Original SD: http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/schem..._1t_3w_1pp.html Greg's *: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v137/Gre...arGroundedl.jpg Note that on my diagram, I have 2 "stars" but they represent the SAME physical star. There just wasn't space on the diagram to keep it neat otherwise. Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~davie Posted January 29, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 29, 2007 ok, thanks guys for the advice. i've done my wiring now exactly to those diagrams and instructions, but for some reason there's still noise. however the tone pot does work now. Also I should mention that i've been testing the pickguard assembly detached from the body. Should I try testing it with the pickguard on the body? will it make a difference? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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