Re-wiring a Casino

[casinoplayer]

Hi guys.

The previous owner of my Casino has buggered up the wiring and I'm going to replace all of the electronics. I can easily handle a soldering iron, so that should be no problem.

I have been reading about using shielded wiring for long runs, and non shielded for short ones, but I haven't been able to find out what is considered a long run, and what is a short one. Is there a rule of thumb?

And what do I do with the shields? I am assuming that I ground one end of the shield (of course avoiding ground loops). Is this a correct assumption?

Thanks for any comments that come along.

[sumgai]

cas,

Hi guys.

The previous owner of my Casino has buggered up the wiring and I'm going to replace all of the electronics. I can easily handle a soldering iron, so that should be no problem.

I have been reading about using shielded wiring for long runs, and non shielded for short ones, but I haven't been able to find out what is considered a long run, and what is a short one. Is there a rule of thumb?

And what do I do with the shields? I am assuming that I ground one end of the shield (of course avoiding ground loops). Is this a correct assumption?

Thanks for any comments that come along.

For a semi-hollow body guitar like yours, it's best to not get into 'guessing games', and just use shielded cable for everything. (Gibson did that originally, but you said yours is all GeFooey (tm, ChrisK) inside, so who knows what you'll find.) Even the shortest runs are exposed to external fields that will propagate noise into your axe, so you'll get the quietest results if you don't skimp on this stage of the game.

Your assumption about ground loops is correct. However, in the case of your Casino, you have another kind of problem. There is no shielding of any sort inside your axe. In many solid body guitars, a modicum of shielding foil is used for noise reduction, but it's also used for conducting the ground portion of the signal. You don't have that advantage, so you will have to connect the shield on both ends for some of your cable runs. Let me illustrate:

Looking at the Bridge volume control, we see the pickup cable coming over to the control, and the hot lead goes to the wiper. The other lead (the pickup cable shield) goes to the pot's shell, or possibly only to one of the pot's terminals. At this point, there's no 'foil' or anything to carry the signal over to the selector switch, so you'll have to supply that path by using the cable's shield itself. Ditto when going from the selector switch to the output jack.

What you don't want to do is run a bare wire from the shell of one control to the next. If you do that and connect all the shields, then you will have a nice ground loop, ready for your humming pleasure.

I don't know what your future plans are for the Casino, but if you are thinking of installing pots mounted with push-pull switches for more control over your sound, then you can run from a pot terminal to a switch terminal without shielding - that's only an inch or inch-and-a-half, which is pretty short. If you suddenly encounter hum after this kind of mod, then shielded cable may be necessary. I'd try it first without though - shielded stuff is hard to maneuver in tight spaces like that. (Which is why you might call this an exception to the rule I stated above.

HTH


sumgai