koilichidi
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Post by koilichidi on Jan 8, 2007 14:46:05 GMT -5
Hello All,
Just have a shielding question.
While on the original guitar nuts site, i was readin the article/tutorial on shielding and wiring, and not too far down I came on the part about lace pickups. You see, I am installing a set hot golds and alumitones on my 2 strats and I was a little relived to find that one wouldn't find much difference in "noise reduction" from shielding a guitar with lace's on it. Now I'm wondering if this would allow me to get away with "minimally" shielding the guitars since i'm using "hum reduced" pups? And by minimally, i mean shielding the cavities only.
I ask this mainly because on one particular strat I plan on installing a clear pickguard, and I wouldn't want too much copper foil to show through (i'm ok with the foil from cavities showing).
I guess the better quesion is,...what can I do to have the least amount of copper foil to show through the clear pickguard?
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Post by frankenstrat on Jan 8, 2007 20:25:36 GMT -5
Use a few coats of shielding paint.
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Post by sumgai on Jan 8, 2007 23:31:58 GMT -5
koilichidi, Hi, and to the forums! Your question is fair, but I have to say, it's a bit out of the ordinary. I mean, how often do we have to consider appearances when we're worried about getting rid of noise/hum? Paint will certainly leave you with the best appearance (through a clear scratchplate (Hint: it's not called ' scratch' for nuttin'!)), but I am of the opinion that it works about like a Bandaid on a space shuttle - not very well at all. Other folks may have a more favorable opinion, but I find paint to be messy, smelly, not nearly as quick as foil (drying time), and last but most important, if it doesn't have an extremely high percentage of metal in it, then it won't do the job. OTOH, foil is solid, no gaps. Works wonders, and is quick, fairly easy to work with, and almost certainly cheaper than anything else you can do. But your question was "how little can I do, since I have Lace Sensors"? BZZZT! Flag on the play! Wrong supposition! Penalty - you must now listen to the rest of the story. Any pickup that purports to be a humbucker of some sort (two coils) can reduce the total hum by a large amount, given sufficient engineering quality. But the pickups are not the only thing that can act like antennae..... nearly everything inside your guitar's cavity can pickup hum too! 'Struth! That's why we shield the whole thing, not just a small part of it. AC fields can enter into any part, and from any direction. You need 360° spherical protection from this insidious invasion, you can't rely on just your Lace units to get rid of all the hum. To be fair, you may never play a venue where your semi-shielded guitar causes you any grief, noise-wise. But there'll come a day, mark my words, when you'll hang your head in embarrassment over your 'show-quality axe' that sounds like Soupy Sales in the Men's Room! And that is the rest of the story, Paul Harvey notwithstanding. In short, if you're gonna do half a job, why not make the effort to do the rest of the job at the same time. It'll save your bacon, sometime down the road. HTH sumgai
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koilichidi
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Post by koilichidi on Jan 9, 2007 12:12:00 GMT -5
Hey thanks for the welcoming!
Yeah,... well, thats life eh? Haha, I wonder why "STeu-MAD" even sells them? I mean, they even have this nice picture of a strat w/ a clear pickguard and traditional singles!
I guess now I have to look for a "designer pickguard" or something,.. ah its a shame, the guitar has a nice flame-burst on top... anyway,. Thanks for the reality check MR Unknown comic, lol.
Again, thanks for all the help. I'll be coming here very often.
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Post by sumgai on Jan 9, 2007 23:40:02 GMT -5
koichi, Hey, wait a minute..... I didn't mean to infer that you shouldn't use a clear pickguard, only that you should not expect the view to be pretty. Big difference, that. There's nothing wrong with getting artistic in applying your shielding. We don't ordinarily think of that, we're so used to opaque scratchplates. How about a shot of clear finish, like a shellac, with lots of metallic particles thrown into the mix? Some people are perfectly happy with that, instead of foil. Might look pretty good, sort of a sparkle effect on top of the deep-luster sunburst finish. Keep it up, we'll all benefit from this kind of "out of the box" thinking. ;D BTW, S-M sells those clear pickguards because they know that not everyone will be shielding their guitars. How do they know this? Because they aren't selling shielding materials or kits with every order! ;D sumgai
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fenleo
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Post by fenleo on Jan 10, 2007 10:19:22 GMT -5
Hello all, On the topic of shielding paint versus copper foil...I would like provide some thoughts and personal experiences to anybody reading this: Shielding paint: I have tried two kinds of paint, one from stew mac...see link below: www.stewmac.com/shop/Electronics,_pickups/Supplies:_Shielding/Conductive_Shielding_Paint.html The other from Less EMF...see link below: www.lessemf.com/paint.htmlIn my opinion the shielding paint just does not work. It is messy and more importantly it does not provide adequate shielding. If you want to figure this out on your own, just buy one of these paints, paint your cavity (10 times! or so)...wait till the paint dries and take your multimeter and set it to the resistance scale and measure away. If you are lucky, you may read out 20-80 ohms...sometimes more! This is not adequate shielding. You should read out say 0.2 to 0.4 ohms. The copper foil provides this type of shielding capability. If anybody would like to weight in on the shielding paint, i would love to hear from anybody who has had a successful experience with using paint. Thanks guys and hope this helps. --fenleo--
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Post by sumgai on Jan 10, 2007 14:02:39 GMT -5
fenleo,
Just because a material is a poor electrical conductor does not mean that is also a poor electromagnetic shield. Consider lead (Pb) for instance......
Paint works for those who are unwilling to see how much better foil is. ;D
sumgai
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koilichidi
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Post by koilichidi on Jan 26, 2007 1:32:43 GMT -5
Ok, How about I use the clear pickguard, glue my own design to it, stick foil underneath the design,.. except... Leave the area of the lower horn (strat) exposed. So basically, its a normal pickguard shieding procedure, except i'm not putting foil in that small area, which I belive doesn't need shielding. I came to this conclusion from toying with the idea that I could use a regular opaque pickguard but cut out a part in the lower horn region to expose a little of the finish there,.. but then, it would be very prone to pickgurad sctraching abuse and soon there would no finish to show off,.. so i thought, why don't i just go with the clear PG, glue some design to it, stick the foil beneath, and leave that little area alone. Then you would be able to see a little bit more finish than if I would have covered the whole PG, but it also has that clear plastic protecting it,.. yes, the area will become dull with pick sctraching eventually, but it will never become opaque,.. you will still be able to see some color,.. and that beats the heck out of "covering it up" I am 99.999% sure there will be no problems because I will be shielding the pickguard in all the crucial areas. There will be contact from the pickguard shielding with the foil in pickup cavities, and the foil in the control cavity and all the pickguard screws except of course, those two screws in the lower horn region. The area exposed will "start" from the tip of the lower horn, stop right before the control cavity obviously, and will not go up beyond the neck and middle pickup cavities,.. I think this is very safe. I wasn't even going to post this because i'm so sure of it but,... there is always some wise guy (and I don't mean that in a bad way) whose gonna say "hey hey,... waait just a minute" and throws all his years of electrical engineering to a face whose head cannot even comprehend how magnets and wire produce such wonderful sounds. Wait, I do comprehend, so theres hope at least. lol,.. so, anybody see problems with the mini-project? thanks.
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