kritmen
Rookie Solder Flinger
Posts: 2
Likes: 0
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Post by kritmen on Feb 26, 2012 11:48:32 GMT -5
Hi guys - cool message board.
Well, I completed the star grounding for my fat start. All is well! ...or was until about 10 minutes ago. I was playing when suddenly there was a characteristic noise of a non-grounded/shielded jack. I know it's the jack because when I move my cable down, the sound goes away (without ME being the ground). The sound also goes away when I touch the strings, but I'm quite certain this is jack specific. So my question is!?:
What part of the output jack should touch the tin foil in the cavity? It seems like if the cable itself touches the foil, the guitar is muted. Is there a smart way to handle this situation so it won't fail again? Or am I completely off about what should or shouldn't touch the jack and cable...
Thanks guys! Really appreciate the time
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Post by reTrEaD on Feb 26, 2012 11:57:56 GMT -5
What part of the output jack should touch the tin foil in the cavity? Not sure what your jack looks like. But here is a picture of a generic 1/4" phone jack. The sleeve (connected to the tab on the right) is used for all grounds, including shielding foil. The large piece protruding upward contacts the tip of the cable. That is connected to the tab on the left. That is for the "hot" signal.
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Post by newey on Feb 26, 2012 12:33:41 GMT -5
Kritmen-
Hello and Welcome to G-Nutz2!
No part of the output jack should be "touching" the shielding. The shielding should be connected to a common grounding point, which is in turn connected to the output jack sleeve connection (as reTrEaD shows above).
Did you perhaps put shielding in the "football" cavity where the output jack goes on a Strat? If so, that will often create problems with contacting the tip of the cable. There's usually very little room to spare in there, particularly on imported Strat clones.
I was thinking you might have shielded the jack cavity because of your statement that:
Yup. Which is why it's problematic to foil the jack cavity.
Rather than putting foil in the confines of the jack cavity, the original Guitarnuts site shielding instructions advises using a shielded cable for the run from the control cavity to the jack. That works just fine, provided the hole through the body between the two cavities is big enough to push the cable through. If it isn't, it's tough to enlarge that hole without the right tools- you need a right angle drill head that's small enough to fit into the control cavity.
In actual practice, the short wire run from the control cavity to the jack is unlikely to be a major noise generator. When I shielded my first guitar, I used the shielded cable approach, but several years later, when I redid the electronics, I omitted the shielded cable and just ran regular wires to the jack. Doing so didn't seem, at least to my admittedly subjective ears, to affect the noise level at all.
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kritmen
Rookie Solder Flinger
Posts: 2
Likes: 0
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Post by kritmen on Feb 26, 2012 13:16:41 GMT -5
Edit:
Took out the foil. Alas, the ground buzz is still there. Must be a loose solder in the wiring...? (Looks like my solder finger monicker may be accurate after all)
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