Jack FFR1846
Well-known member
I was doing a complete redo on a guitar of mine with new switch, pots and a couple pickups from a silhouette spec into a non-ebmm guitar (hey, ya can't blame me for wanting to improve what I got!) and while working on it and paying attention to where all of the ground wires were going, it occured to me that the aluminum shielding on the pickguard could actually be screwing up the single point ground connection (aka star connection) that is on the body of the volume pot.
What do I mean, screwing it up? Well, the aluminum is a conductor as well as a shield. Yes, the pots have a wire from tone pot to the volume pot body. But the shielding is making physical contact to the tone and volume pot. In theory, this provides a parallel path.
On the counter side, one might argue that aluminum is not as good of a conductor as copper, so won't carry any signal (or current).......but......it's very wide of an area....like a ground plane in a pc board. So the impedance could be low.
My question is.....should we actually be cutting out sections of the shielding aluminum to avoid another path to the tone pots and switch? As maybe another alternative, should we instead solder a bare wire to each tone pot, and route it down to the aluminum shield, then up to the next pot, to the shield and finally to the volume pot?
Be as technical as you want electrically. I'm a EE
I have included a pole just to allow random answers.....
What do I mean, screwing it up? Well, the aluminum is a conductor as well as a shield. Yes, the pots have a wire from tone pot to the volume pot body. But the shielding is making physical contact to the tone and volume pot. In theory, this provides a parallel path.
On the counter side, one might argue that aluminum is not as good of a conductor as copper, so won't carry any signal (or current).......but......it's very wide of an area....like a ground plane in a pc board. So the impedance could be low.
My question is.....should we actually be cutting out sections of the shielding aluminum to avoid another path to the tone pots and switch? As maybe another alternative, should we instead solder a bare wire to each tone pot, and route it down to the aluminum shield, then up to the next pot, to the shield and finally to the volume pot?
Be as technical as you want electrically. I'm a EE
I have included a pole just to allow random answers.....
