Complete Shielding of Cavity/Pickguards and stargrounding

[ictaros]

Hi there.

Are there any local shops that provide complete shielding (aka Quieting the beast mod) with star-grounding rewiring? If so, what are the charges?

I inquired at Davis but they don't provide this service.

 

[mudmechanic]

It's a real pig of a job so I'm not surprised that no one is interested. The shielding can be done with copper tape or shielding paint.

If you are up to trying it out yhourself, I can sell you some of the graphite based shielding paint and give you the sinstructions on how to do the work yourself. a friend just painted the cavities with the paint and did nothing else and still noticed a drop in the hum.

Part of the problem is that it is almost impossible to remove noise from ciruits unless everything from the wires, cavities, pots and input jacks are shielded. You might try and work out how much noise you want to remove first and then procede to that level of shielding.

cheers,

Mark.

 

[jumbofret]

Hmm... I agree with mudmechanic, it's a real pain in the neck! I did one long ago, but I screwed up by using linear pots instead of audio. Also, inexperience in soldering. lol

 

[mikemann]

This is a very subjective issue. Firstly your pickup must not be the source of the noise pickup, or whatever you do afterwards will defeat the purpose. Some pickup design is 'noisy by nature'.

Then would come the complete overhaul of the wiring circuitry.

We do that by firstly ripping out all the original circuitry. When I say all, I mean almost all the wires and parts.

Next is to put a ground shield to the controls cavity. This can be done by using a (good) conductive paint, or (better) aluminum sheet, or (best) copper sheet. Note that this conductive ground layer can work for you or totally against you. Meaning you must wire up properly and have good soldering discipline, or else any loose signal cable contact with the grounding will render your signal usless.

Afterwhich is to rewire everything back together, replacing wherever needed "shielded cable" in it's path.

Ground points selection is very important. Sometime a single star grounding method is not practical to do. So again, experience and skill come in play here to select the proper grounding point and doing up the wiring route.

Do note, that between a properly done up wiring job and a totally kiasu full grounding job, the noise difference could be very small, if the total signal chain is properly taken care of, from the guitar to the amp.

If you were to ask me to do the above job. I guess could take me about 1/2 day or so to do. So charges of lets say $100 service charge before parts for such a job by a professional is pretty fair by my books.

 

[jumbofret]

Hmm... I would like to help out... But wiring and soldering, you have to do it yourself! :wink:

I got the tools and some of the material you need. Soldering iron, desoldering pump, solder, heavy duty aluminum sheet, etc. But I don't have stuff like caps, pots, ring terminals.

I have the printout as well, so you could refer to it while working.