recommended pots and wire

[bladerunner]

Hello All:

This board rocks with incredible knowledge and insight!

Can someone suggest some pots and wiring including specs?

I have vintage style humbuckers with only one wire coming out of the humbuckers... gray wire, with white wire coming out...i.e gray used for grounding against pots and white wire that is solder to volume and tone pots.

I'm looking to replace the cheap 500 k pots...volume and tone.. the tone pots have .47 k capacitors.

what is the recommended type of good quality pots? as well what would be the recommended type (terminology) type of wire that I should buy?

should I stay away from the pots at circuit city and get the pots from a 3rd party guitar manufacturer?

do the pots have to be 500 k pots for humberkers? would larger pots, say 3 watt wirewound variable resistor 20% tolerance, 25 ohm pots work? I have seen them at circuit city...

thxs

[ccoleman]

500k is normal for humbuckers. 25 ohm wirewound would fail spectacularly as they are for higher power circuits. check guitarelectronics.com or warmouth.com (many other sites also) for these type of parts, or even get a premade prewired strat pickguard complete with pots and wiring for only about 35 dollars..

[bladerunner]

what about the type of wire? what gauge should I use for soldering and replacing bad wire?

Shielded circuit wire or standard circuit wire?

[ccoleman]

22-28 gauge should be fine.

For types of wire, personally I would use unshielded twisted pair (UTP) if you have shielded the control and pickup cavities as describe in the QTB [Quiet The Beast] mod instructions are on guitarnuts.com

..if you dont have your guitar's guts shielded, use braid or foil shielded single- or multi-conductor wire.

[sumgai]

br,

ccoleman said:

.......
as described in the QTB [Quiet The Beast] mod instructions are on guitarnuts.com.

You can find that article here.


sumgai

[sumgai]

Hey, wait a minute here........

bladerunner said:

.......
I'm looking to replace the cheap 500 k pots...volume and tone.. the tone pots have .47 k capacitors.

You can start by selling those capacitors to me, they're not exactly ordinary, ya know. ;D

Sorry, it must have been a temporary flashback. [snicker] I'll try to not let that happen again.

Most tone capacitors in a HB setup will use a 0.047µfd cap. What you've described is not what I'd call an ordinary marking. Perhaps if you were to look this page here, you could tell us for sure what's in there.

But my money is on 0.047µfd...... it would be extremely obvious if your axe sounded greatly different from other dual-HB setups.

HTH


sumgai